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July 1, 2006
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This weekend, before July 4th, is one of the busiest travel weekends of the year. Local news often do stories about how crowded the roads and airlines are. This week, in our local paper, they focused on the fact that Northwest airlines, which handles about 70% of our traffic, had the worst customer service rating of any national airline. To those of us who have been forced to fly this airline over the past twenty years, this comes as no great shock. Personally, I do long, hard internet searches for ANY other reasonable alternative before flying Northwest. The bad experiences I've had are too numerous and tedious to outline here, but suffice it to say, that the majority of travelers on NWA are not thriled that they dominate our air travel choices. The decisions (or lack of) by NWA's ownership and corporate leadership, will someday be a textbook of what not to do, in order to operate a successful company. Along the way, they have totally destroyed the morale of the employees, who no longer care about performing their jobs. They are simply putting time in, and the passengers are suffering because of it. They're in bankruptcy now, demanding pay and benefit cuts from all of the employees, but of couse not for senior management, futher reducing morale. They are overloading planes, charging extra for aisle seats, gotten rid of pillows, blankets, meals, or any form of personal interaction with their customers. They are simply herding cattle.
Unfortunately, they are not alone. I talked with someone who had just returned form a family vacation to DisneyWorld in Florida, and their comment was that the service had deteriorated greatly from prior visits. Disney used to be the shining example of how to treat customers in order to encourage them to stay longer and spend more. It seems companies are praying at the altar of increasing "shareholder value" while reducing customer service.
All of this is to get to the point that I'm starting to see this trend in in our industry. Call a management company these days and it takes 5 minutes to of automated instructions to reach the voice mail of someone you hope can help you. The industry, which has almost always been behind the technological curve, is racing to catch up so fast that it isn't thinking out the ramifcations of the changes they are implementing. If it reduces costs or time spent, then lets plug it in. We'll worry about what our clients think later. Well, I'll tell you what they're thinking - the same thing I'm thinking about Northwest - where did it go, and why should I continue to use their services?
Before you buy that cutting edge piece of technology or implement that new policy to handle some assocaition issue, don't just ask yourself if it will improve efficiency or provide better service, ask yourself whether the customer will actually recognize that service is improved, or better yet, ask them.
Posted by joewest at July 1, 2006 10:21 PM