The drumbeat of complaints regarding United Airline’s deteriorating customer service continues. In the Trade Your Bags For Another $1/Hr post, I mentioned the results of the recent University of Michigan customer satisfaction survey. If the satisfaction index for the airline industry in general plummeted — they’re now just barely ahead of the IRS — then the score for United Airlines did a free-fall, landing at the bottom of the list. TravelCommons got looped into an edge of this growing blogstorm. Our last post, commenting on the Chicago Tribune story about the weekend-long ordeal of United passengers trying to get home from Jamaica, was picked up by a UCLA law professor who then linked over to last week’s USAToday article titled “United passengers air their bitter grievances”. The article lists an incredible litany of complaints.

Things only got worse last week when an IT tester took down United’s entire operations system, stranding most of their fleet Wednesday morning. I was flying from San Francisco (SFO) to Chicago (ORD) that evening and felt lucky that my flight arrived only 50 minutes late. Two days later, I received a fairly bland e-mail apology from United’s Vice-President of Customer Experience Barbara Higgins:

Dear Mark A Peacock,

On behalf of United, I want to express our sincere regrets for any disruption to service you may have experienced when flying with us on Wednesday and Thursday this week. We know you expect us to take you where you want to go with on-time departures and arrivals. We failed to meet your expectations on those days.

As you may be aware, a computer outage, due to human error during routine system testing, significantly impacted our operations systemwide. Working as a team, we were able to get our airplanes and crews back on schedule … and our passengers on their way.

We greatly appreciated your patience and know that we will make every effort to keep this type of situation from occurring in the future.

Your satisfaction and business mean a great deal to United, and we look forward to our next opportunity to serve you.

Sincerely,

Barbara Higgins
Vice-President
Customer Experience
United Airlines

I compare this to the impassioned, heartfelt apology over the PA from the lead flight attendant on my SFO-ORD flight. Obviously exhausted by a long day, his voice cracked as he thanked us for “hanging in there” on what was a “helluva” day. The whole crew lined up and thanked each passenger as we left the plane.

Though I’ve had more than my share of rude gate agents and flight attendants, this episode reinforced my sense that the cause of United’s (and American’s and Northwest’s) customer service woes lies with those employees and managers who never see a passenger — the ones who can hide by ignoring ringing phones and full e-mail boxes. An article in Monday’s Wall Street Journal talks about the impact of training programs that require executives to perform front-line jobs. I’d like to see Ms Higgins roll up her sleeves and clean up the backlog of ticket refunds mentioned by so many passengers interviewed in the USAToday article, or help find some lost luggage, or help work some of those concourse-long lines that appear when United’s delays and cancellations force people to miss their flights. Perhaps some front-line experience would incent her and her colleagues to fix United’s mess rather than send me their generic apologies.