My CEO Life

The story of Canadian Dave Carroll and United airlines is quite amazing. Dave is a country singer and he and his band were on a trip with United from Halifax to Nebraska that had a layover in Chicago. During this layover the baggage handlers at Chicago’s O’Hare managed to destroy his guitar.

Now you would have thought that United would pay for his guitar to be replaced. They didn’t come to the party claiming the Dave Carroll didn’t make a claim with 24 hours. Dave was given the complete run around with United refusing to take any responsibility for the damage.

So what did Dave do, he wrote a song about his experience and that song hit You Tube on Monday last week and has already had over 2.3 million views. Check it out … oh and it is called … United Breaks Guitars.

So what do we learn from this?

Well firstly, United must have some very questionable baggage handling techniques. If you are to going to fly United, I would try to take carry-on luggage or better still, fly another airline.

Secondly, United’s customer service approach seems to be designed to say “no” – no matter how legitimate your complaint is.

Thirdly, the $3k to replace the guitar is cheap compared to the brand damage that this whole episode is causing United. And there is nothing they can do about it now. The cat is out of the bag and will run its own course. In today’s social media world, you never know how poor customer service is going to come back and bite you.

Finally, Dave Carroll and his band have made this an opportunity to further their careers. 2.3 million people is a great audience. Hopefully they will release an album soon to take advantage of their new found fame.

Oh … and if you thought United had got off relatively light? Dave and his band have 2 more songs in the works.

I am writing this entry from my very expensive business class seat somewhere over the international dateline between Los Angeles and Melbourne. I tried to use Qantas’ award winning entertainment system and it didn’t work. The staff rebooted the system a few times and politely told me how this happens all the time and that they have complained to management etc … The problem was this is not the first time it has happened to me – in fact I would say that the system doesn’t work on about 50% of the flights I take.

As I didn’t have much else I could do, I got to thinking about what responsibilities to its customers a business has if it has a near monopoly position.

Read more…

A month or so ago, in one of my other blogs My Travelling Life, i talked about how i thought the service of Qantas was slipping.  In particular i talked about a flight i recently had from San Francisco to Sydney in which a fellow passenger spilled water all over me and the Qantas guys really didn’t seem to care too much.  (Read entry)

However, imagine my surprise on the next international Qantas flight i had from Sydney to Los Angeles via Auckland that i ended up on one of the oldest 747-300 (yes 300 not 400) between Auckland and LA. Now you know its old when the seats in business class barely recline and the concept of inflight entertainment is 10 channels.

Read more…

I am not sure if you have heard, but there is an MP3 file doing the rounds of the internet of a customer trying to cancel his service with AOL.

It is an amazing call for two reasons

1. The sales person actually fights with the customer and makes it almost impossible for the customer to cancel
2. I dont even use AOL and have heard about it and will never use them – who wants to be treated like that.

Click here to check out the audio file http://www.jessejcollins.com/files/aolcancellationeditfinal.mp3

The bottom line is that we live in a world of amazing transparency.  The world of blogs, podcasts and social networking can fundamentally cause a business to boom (like www.youtube.com) or flop.  Public opinion is so transparent and everyone who has a public face to your business must realise that everything they say and do could end up in the public forum.  Nothing is sacred!