Plane Conversations

When I was in the Army, I spent most of one summer in the rainy northwest, specifically Fort Lewis, Washington.  For a boy from Mississippi, this was the farthest from home I had ever been.  It was a bit of an adventure and the memory of my time there is punctuated with visions of rain (loads of it), long marches, Blackhawk helicopters, insane numbers of push-ups, and a sergeant who seemed to have it in for me.  While many of the faces and details have faded from memory, I can’t forget the “Cattle Cars”.

These were troop transporters that made a plain yellow school bus seem like a limousine.  Their only function was to get you from A to B without being hurt.  You usually rode standing up and packed in so tightly that, if you had equipment on, there was hardly room to shift your weight.  They’d pack us in with a shoehorn and then move us to our training site. We’d pile out at our destination simply relieved to have fresh air.  The label “Cattle Car” was well deserved!

Airline travel today is a lot like riding in those cattle cars.  You’re relieved to: a) be at your destination, because b) it means you can get off the plane and out of the system.

In his book The E-Myth Enterprise , business guru Michael Gerber talks about a number of characteristics that give a business that “extra” that brings real and lasting success.  One principle in particular that stood out to me was  “Service in an incomplete word.”  His point is that service has to be part of a larger view of success.  It must be grounded in a company that is healthy, innovative, stable, and profitable.  In short, that frees a business to turn the focus to the customer.  Could this be one reason service is so lacking with airline travel?

Service?  Airlines?  Those words don’t even seem like they belong in the same sentence.  We’ve come a long way since the photo at left was snapped on an airliner in the 1950’s.  At every turn, customer service continues to be reduced.  Meals went to sandwiches, which went to peanuts, which went to you-pay-for-it, which finally went to “No, you can’t have the entire can of coke”.   Baggage went from one checked to one carry on, to well, “you pay for it”.  Exit rows went from “We need people to sit here in the event of an emergency”  to, yep, “You pay for it.” 

Customer service?  Right. 

A 2009 article from Time Magazine reported that trying to find someone to talk with in customer service has become virtually a losing game.  Delta, United, and American don’t even have a customer service number.  When the Time magazine author asked to lodge a complaint about poor customer service  he was told in no uncertain terms that there wasn’t a customer support number, but that he could send an email.  When he tried to send the email he received a message that said, “We are sorry but this service is unavailable at this time. Please try again later.”  The article concludes, “The major carriers have, quietly, made it steadily more difficult to air your complaints to a live human being…”  

Or consider the damning success of a video created by musician Dave Carroll of the band Sons Of Maxwell.  He and other passengers witnessed United baggage handlers throwing his guitar on the tarmac as it was being loaded.  The Taylor Guitar was broken (not just any guitar, but a Taylor…a shame) and after a year of getting absolutely no resolution whatsoever, he told United Airlines he’d write a song about it.  He did and it became a youtube phenomenon getting more than 8.5 million views on the first of a three-song trilogy on the event.   Dave Carroll also was interviewed on CNN, CBS and other national outlets. (Still think social media isn’t changing the landscape?)  It’s worth a watch: 

Back to Michael Gerber and the E-Myth Enterprise.  It’s not all about simply emphasizing customer service, it’s about creating a company that is healthy and a corporate climate that understands people.  Gerber observes, “There can be no such thing as customer service in a company where the employees are disenchanted, where the owners aren’t making a decent profit and where the suppliers aren’t getting paid on time.”

People are disenchanted, frustrated and even angry at what they are forced to endure when they fly in the airline system. 

Great!  This disenchantment, frustration and anger creates opportunity.  There is an opportunity out there for someone, some company to find a way to make air travel work– from the consumer’s as well as the business’s perspective.   The most obvious candidate for this will be vast charter network of companies that are still small enough to care, still nimble enough to be proactive, and instilled with a deep desire to to something great.

How about airline customer service?  I’d even settle for customer awareness!  Otherwise I’m just one more head in the cattle car.

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