United Airlines refers to customer as "Mr. Human" in reply to complaint. Lee Moran, New York Daily News
When a Florida reporter registered a complaint with United Airlines, he may have expected a heartfelt note back addressing his gripe.
What he wouldn't have anticipated, however, is being sent this email where the airline called him the ever-so-friendly "Mr. Human" an astonishing three times.I'm not surprised by this, not in the least. Because, if you've spent anytime dealing with United customer service it's pretty clear that the company provides them scripts from which they are forced to follow, with no alternatives, in conflict resolution. The solutions are in place whether they benefit the customer or not.
I'm going to provide two recent examples of (embarrassingly) identical situations and explain how both Avis and United handled them. You be the judge.
First: A few key admissions.
1. In both of these cases the fault was ENTIRELY on me. There was no blame to be placed on either companies. I messed up, and I admitted as such.
2. At no point did I ever argue with either company over the eventual result of the process.
3. I do not believe that United was inherently wrong in their approach to the situation. Customer (flyer) Unfriendly? Yes. But, can I fault them? Not really.
Scenario One: On a business trip in Denver I dropped off my rental car at the Avis Car Return in DEN. I then hopped on the shuttle bus to the terminal. About half-way to the terminal I realized that I had left my suit-jacket and tie in the back-seat of the car.
I stayed on the bus and rode back to the rental center, found a worker who pointed me in the direction of lost and found. When I arrived at lost & found they could not find the car (it had been immediately driven to a city location for a rental). To further complicate matters, my rental agreement had the wrong license plate on it. Sensing no hope I left my information with Denise, the very nice lost and found clerk, hopped on the bus and rode back to the terminal.
The next day I received a message from Denise. They had found my jacket and tie and were shipping it via FedEx to my house. I received it about three days later.
Scenario Two: On a business trip to Midland I left my Samsung Galaxy 7 tablet in the seatback pocket of the airplane. I had put it there to take a nap (this was the return flight) and was dead tired. I forgot the tablet and did not realize it was missing until I got home.
I immediately reached out to the best customer service outlet United has, the Twitter team. They said they would forward my information to some people who gave me a link to fill out a claim form. I filled out the claim form and waited.
That night, at around 10 AM, I received a call from Jerry in Florida. It seems that my tablet flew from Houston to Corpus Christi, back to Houston and then to St. Petersburg Florida where the cleaning crew found it that evening. I was also told at that time that the ONLY WAY United would return the item to me was for me to set up a FedEx account so they could bill me. I was not given an option to use UPS or the USPS or any other solution that might work for me. "This is company policy" it was explained.
Having no choice, and being the idiot who left his tablet in the seatback cushion, I set up a FedEx account (that I will probably never use again since I typically ship through UPS), which included providing credit card information, etc. and called David with United the next morning who took my information and shipped the item back to my house as I requested. It arrived two days later and I should note that everyone I spoke to was very polite. I have no issues with how this was handled on a professional, personal interaction level.
Which leads us to the question: What did United do wrong here?
In my opinion, nothing really. As I stated earlier, I was the one who left my item behind (in both cases) and I really had no problem taking care of the payment to have it shipped. I would have gladly paid had AVIS asked me to. I don't believe that it's necessarily on the company to take a financial hit (albeit a tiny one) just because one of their customers (me) is inattentive.
That said, which policy is more customer friendly? And which company is currently spending Millions of dollars advertising themselves as "Flyer Friendly"?
As with the 'Mr. Human' response there's a lot of evidence that United customer service is doing nothing more than reading from scripts. This human has problem X, send them form letter X. This person has problem Y, send them instructions Y and tell them there's no other option but option Y. Yes, this ensures a consistent response to many problems but not always the best response.
True customer service takes work and a staff that really enjoys interacting with people and finding them solutions. They also have to be experts at informing the customer when there is no possible solution that is going to make them 100% happy. It takes a special talent to tell a customer that, although they might not always be right, they are always the customer and there may be additional options available to help resolve their problem.
Pre-printed scripts, form letters and one-size-fits-all "solutions" are a way to ensure that no one CSR goes off the reservation, but they don't always solve the root cause of the problem or make the customer feel valued.
United was right to assume that I would pay for shipping, and I had no problem doing so. In fact, I was surprised that AVIS decided to pay for what was basically my mistake.
So, from that perspective I guess you could say it's not that United did poorly, only that others are doing it much better and, in today's travel world, that means they're falling behind.
The 2nd thing to learn from this story is that after two solid weeks of business travel I am not operating at peak performance. I've never left anything behind while traveling before. yet twice in two weeks I left two items of some importance. Of course, I'm done putting things in seat-back pockets and I'm not taking the rental car to the drop-off again without making sure everything is in it's appropriate place ready to go on the plane.
So there's a lesson in this for me as well.
