The New Life of Customer Service

United Airlines recently sent the vast amount of their staff to America’s most magical place: Disney World. The hopes for United was for them to overhaul their customer service program. But why does it take hundreds of thousands of dollars to send your employees to Disney just to over haul your customer service?

Having been an employee for two hotels, and having a small customer service background, I feel that they did the right thing, but they shouldn’t have let things get bad in the first place. If you feel that your customer service is going down, fix it before it is too late. You must deal with the problem from the source. The best correlation I can do for this, is Tony from Zappos. The CEO of Zappos is on Twitter. SouthwestAir is on Twitter. I think that you can use Twitter for means of communication far more expansive then people first began to take it for. My suggestion is that it is possible to find out what you need to do better, and break it down. Demographically and also as a broad subject in whole. Granted, some aspects cannot be changed. Delays, cancellations, etc. Shit Happens. But you should not have desk agents who have been there for 12 hours, and have dealt with rushy business people all day, dealing with more problems.  Keep fresh staff. Always keep people around who want to work, who want to show off and be exceptional to your clients. 

In the hotel industry we do this all the time! They don’t even have to be honors guests, or have a VIP pass or whatever it is. Pick someone, and Upgrade them. Give them business class, or give them first class, why? For the hell of it. Give them a reason to come back and fly with you. I have upgraded people into our highest suite, why? No reason, I thought they had a cool personality, or they were a cute girl checking in. Seriously, don’t ask questions, if the flight isn’t booked. Upgrade.

If you want answers, find them out from the clients. Send 2 people to your major hubs, and ask: What can we do better for you? Or: What would you like to see from us? The simple questions make people think about your company and give you a solid and instant feed back. Go to your customers, ask them, don’t go on word of mouth from client to desk agent, to manager, to others and up the corporate ladder. If you want to know what’s going wrong, go out and ask. I never hear anything about the CEO’s going out and doing anything, its always just what happens. I would like to see more from the head “honchos”. It makes it seem like they’re actually caring and want to do something for themselves and their company. 

So from me to you Big Companies. Stop spending your money to send employees to Disney, but go out yourselves. What can you do? What have you been doing wrong from the start?

Maybe it’s time for a complete overhaul.