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.

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.

Qantas is a great example of a business with a near monopoly position on the Australia – USA routes. Your choices on the route are limited to Qantas, United Airlines and if you don’t mind going via New Zealand, Air New Zealand. Given the frightful quality of United Airlines and the desire to go non-stop between the two countries, you are really don’t have any choice except for Qantas.

Now Qantas charges their customers up to $14,000 for a business class seat. This is a hefty price to pay given a seat in Economy is probably costing around $3,000. So what is the expectation of someone paying four to five times the cost of an economy seat? You want the legroom and the ability to lie down, access to power in the seat so you can work if needed and entertainment to keep you amused. Everything else is secondary in justifying the massive price difference. The business class food is just not that good!

The area that Qantas seems to fall down is in its entertainment system. Qantas touts its award winning entertainment system as giving the view a massive selection of films and TV shows to watch. The problem is that it doesn’t work all the time. In fact, I think the cabin crew have become experts at rebooting the system and placating disappointed customers. I have accumulated a range of duty free vouchers and bottles of wine as an apology for the system not working.

As Qantas has a virtual monopoly on the route I think it has an obligation to go above and beyond in the delivery of its service to its customers. While it could be argued that they can get away with average service in Economy, the business and first class traveller expects and deserves more. How hard can it be to identify what is important to these customer segments and to make sure that these important things are delivered faultlessly. For me, I am more interested in being entertained for 14 hours rather than the next greatest Neil Perry dish.

In addition to making sure that the customer service is delivered faultlessly, it is important that when things go wrong (as they will), the employees are trained to handle the situation properly. More often than not, when I raise the entertainment system issue with Qantas the cabin crew initially apologies (great) and then lay blame with management. Well from a customer’s perspective, I don’t care. What I do care about is the experience I am having now and the impact that is having on my overall product experience.

Offering me duty free vouchers and bottles of wine doesn’t always make the experience better. It ameliorates the problem at the time however there is still a bad taste left in my mouth after the complete experience.
I am flying Qantas again from Australia back to the US in a couple of weeks and am hoping for a better experience – we will see! I look forward to some more competition on the route with the launch of Virgin Pacific in February. Perhaps this will shake the complacent Qantas from its customer service slumber.

As a post script … they lost my bags!!!

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.

This is not exactly the sort of service you expect on a trans-Pacific flight and i put it down to Qantas running an old plane between Auckland and LA as a normal part of service. I tried to sleep but in the end it was pretty hard.

So therefore imagine my surprise when out of the blue i received a letter from Qantas saying that due to technical difficulties they had run an old plane on the route, that they were sorry for the inconvenience and more impressively, they actually gave me a voucher for $400 that i could use on any Qantas flight.

Now given all the bad press that Qantas has been receiving about safety, maintenance and downsizing, i had not expected them to do anything and in fact i had thought that the poor service was just part of the route i was taking. This approach has reaffirmed my belief in Qantas as a quality carrier and this simple act will ensure a lot more business from me.

This is a great example of when things go wrong, a company should not hide, make excuses or hope that the customers forget.  Instead they should get on the front foot, apologise and if appropriate, deliver some “make good” to the customer.  The result is that my views on Qantas, which had been slipping, have improved and i will continue to actively choose to use them.

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!