The Chicago Tribune‘s Sunday Business section featured a 3,600-word in-depth analysis of a United Airlines flight that went terribly wrong. United Flight 1073 was supposed to leave Montego Bay, Jamaica at 1:55pm on Saturday, March 31, 2007. It didn’t leave the ground until the following Monday, April 2. The article is a very good read, and identifies two cost-cutting tactics as the main culprits for the weekend from hell endured by the passengers:
- United’s employee count has been cut to a level that has no slack to handle extraordinary events. Flight 1073 is just the most recent example. The December 2006 blizzards that closed United’s Chicago and Denver hubs clearly illustrated the company’s lack of “surge” capacity
- United’s bankruptcy restructuring included aggressively replacing United employees with contract workers. However, they didn’t replace the informal communication channels that company employees typically provide. It seems that no United executive was aware of the situation in Jamaica until Saturday night when one passenger, according to the article, “sat in the bathroom and sent e-mails to everyone he could think of: newspaper reporters, friends who work at United, even the airline’s CEO, Glenn Tilton. ‘Please, help us!’ the messages said. One of his missives was forwarded to (Barbara) Higgins (the new vice-president of customer experience), who eventually responded.”
You have to feel a little bad for Barbara Higgins, who just the day before took the job as vice-president of customer experience. She does stand-up and take responsibility for the problem — “What we tried to do was acknowledge the utter failure of our service on that flight.” However, United doesn’t appear to be doing anything new. According to the article, “Higgins and her team prepared to greet every person returning from Jamaica with apologies, $300 travel vouchers and a special lane to speed them through immigration in Chicago. The airline would later agree to reimburse passengers for all out-of-pocket costs.” “We want to proactively acknowledge that this is not the service we want to provide,” Higgins said.
How about saving a few of those travel voucher and hiring a few more gate agents, baggage handlers and call center agents? How about being “proactive” about avoiding delays instead of flying a team around with make-nice coupons that, given the current seat occupancy rates, are nearly impossible to use anyways? Higgins’ challenge is to improve the customer experience for everyone, not just paper it over for the few who endured a weekend in hell courtesy of United Airlines.
2 comments on “Can’t Outsource Responsibility”
Comments are closed.
I’ve worked in customer service for years, and I’ve learnt that there are two ways to deal with problems: pro-actively (make sure they never happen) and reactively (fight the fire after it’s been set).
When Barbara Higgins, bless her, says “We want to proactively acknowledge that this is not the service we want to provide,†she is wrong. Handing out travel vouchers and offering to pay expenses *after* they’ve been incurred is not proactive. It is reactive.
Sigh.
It’s weird to experience this from, relatively speaking, the other side of the fence. I, too, remember when we were treated as customers on flights. Now we’re just filling seats.
Recently I made the decision I will never ever ever fly Continental to the US because they charge for all their alcoholic beverages. Shell out 6 bucks for a glass of wine while still paying basically the same price as the other carriers? Nah.
In some ways I think we were just so spoiled – makes me think of my grandmother acting like a blue blood, flying Delta to West Palm Beach in my childhood. I ate my first piece of pecan pie on a plane, and it was actually pretty good.
But the airlines’ cost cutting measures these days makes me think of a report I saw once about an Aeroflot flight: someone was carting a frozen, dead deer.
I guess these are some of the costs of “flying for the masses”.