Customer Service Is The New Marketing…Except If You’re United Airlines

I guess UAL didn’t get the memo that customer service is an integral part of marketing.

On a flight home from Austin yesterday, I spilled an entire cup of coffee on my husband’s lap. How nice for him that I was too lazy to take out my own tray table, opting instead to put my coffee on his, only to spill it within seconds of placing it there.

The two cocktail napkins given to me with said coffee were of no use, so I jumped up to find something better to soak up the mess. The flight attendants had quickly moved to the back of the cabin serving more delectable beverages, but the first class galley was just three rows ahead of my bulkhead coach seat.

“The galley!” My trying-to-think-fast mind thought. “There must be something in there I can use — and it’s so much closer than the flight attendant.”

Voila. A package of cloth things sat on the galley counter. I grabbed one, rushed back to my husband’s seat and sopped up whatever coffee hadn’t already been absorbed into his jeans, shirt and seat cushion.

A few minutes later, the flight attendant arrived, for what a thought was last minute support. “Is everything OK here?” she asked. “I think I’ve got it under control,” I explained. “I spilled my coffee all over my husband. Sorry, but I grabbed one of these clothes from the galley to clean it up,” I said, as I held the empty coffee cup and soaked rag on top of it.

To my surprise, she snarled back at me: “Well now I’m not going to have enough of those!” referring to the cloth thing.

“Wow,” I thought as she angrily grabbed the remaining mess and disappeared behind the first class cabin curtain. That wasn’t the reaction I was expecting.

Imagine my surprise when a few minutes later she reappeared from the behind the curtain. Clearly, she wasn’t through with me.

“You know. I only get a certain amount of place mats for each flight and now, because you went up there and took one, I don’t have enough, ” she said with an attitude that was wrong on so many levels. “I wouldn’t go in your office looking for things and you shouldn’t either. The next time…” she continued before I cut her off.

“The next time?” I asked her. “I don’t really think they’ll be a next time. This was an accident.”

I tried to empathize with her. “My sister’s a flight attendant so I understand that now you’re short — but I think you’re over reacting. It’s just a place mat.”

But she would not give up.

“Oh really?” she asked in a sarcastic voice that said “Yeah. Sure she is. And I’m a skydiver in my spare time.” “And what would your sister say about all this?”

Snap.

Her attitude pushed me over the edge and I was done being apologetic or polite.

“She’d say you were an idiot,” I said, and went back to reading my book, ignoring her as she shut the curtain with a swoosh and went back to first class.

The point of this little tale is not to show that you should keep your own damn coffee on your own damn tray tables. Nor is it to tell you to avoid the weak, this-is-airlines-coffee-what-was-I-thinking beverage because it’s crap anyway and if it spills on your pants or your husband’s pants you’re going to be soggy for the remainder of the flight.

It’s to show that every interaction with a customer is important. Either in the air, on the ground, on the phone or on the web. Every interaction is a chance to have a good exchange (which will bode well for your brand) or a bad exchange (which won’t bode so well – um, see above).

If this United Airlines employee was responding to me in an online United Airlines community site, or through an email exchange, I doubt she would have acted so rudely. But she thought, in the privacy of her cabin 40,000 feet up, she could mouth off to a customer with no ramifications.

Not the case.

This one employee –not a delay, not a crappy seat with no leg room, not the bad coffee– left a bad taste in my mouth (pun intended) about United Airlines. What’s ironic, though, is the announcement at the end of almost every flight today: “We know you have a choice in airlines…blah, blah, blah.”

Yes. I do. And I probably won’t be choosing United again anytime soon.

Think about it.

How are you communicating with your customers? You probably feel good about the communications you have with prospects and clients. But what about the way others in your company communicate? Are they causing good will or bad for your brand?

How can you be confident you don’t have a nasty flight attendant giving your brand a bad name?

As a marketer, it’s worth finding out.

To Twit or Not to Twit

When I first heard about Twitter, my initial reaction was: “How retarded.”

Why did I need to know the most mundane information about people? Why did I need to share my own mundane information with others? And why on earth would I follow or want to be “followed” by total strangers?

The whole concept struck me as yet another way to waste time on the web, under the guise of “social media.”

Marketing Kitty’s cat-like tendencies were kicking in. Change? I don’t like change. Hisssss. I’m not Twittering.

I moved on from my initial hesitation and got myself a Twitter account. My first tweet?

Talk about retarded.

But I was curious. There had to be more to this than talking about frozen yogurt. I thought about how to use Twitter for work. What if I followed people who were interested in the same things I’m interested in? What would I learn?

So I went to twitter and did a few searches. One on Marketing 2.0. Another on Web 2.0. And another of Enterprise 2.0. The results weren’t so overwhelming that I didn’t know where to start — just a few dozen people who had listed the same interests as I had in their profile.

I poked around in some of these profiles, finding people that I thought were interesting and had relevant tweets.

I followed them.

Oddly enough, some of them started following me.

After playing around in this new land of Twitter for a few hours, it all didn’t seem so retarded anymore. (Except for the terminology. I still find that pretty moronic: tweet, twittering, tweetup, twaffic, etc..) See more doosies here.

I saw “thwirl” listed next to some people’s tweets and wondered what that was. Ah. A desktop app that makes it easy to see what all the people I’m following have to say. I downloaded it. Kind of cool. It just sits on my desktop and updates automatically. I can put in my tweets as well.

Over the next few days I learned a few more tricks: directly responding to someone (d twitter name), replying to someone (@twitter name) and twittering from my cell phone.

Could I live without Twitter? Yeah. Sure.

But it is useful? Yes.

Lots of the folks I follow post links that are relevant to me. Or they comment about stuff that’s just plain interesting. News travels quickly on Twitter. I heard it there first about Tim Russert’s heart attack. About Obama beating Hillary.

As I follow more people that I know, it’s a really simple way to know what they’re up to without actually having to talk to them. That sounds crazy and antisocial but it isn’t. It’s hyper social. I can know in an instant what my friends are doing. Who’s packing for a business trip, who’s stuck at the airport and who, possibly, just ate frozen yogurt. It’s a great way to stay in touch without doing a whole lot.

Perfect for those of us trying to stuff 25 hours into a 24 hour day.

Found Religion

Last week, I attended a one-day conference on the 10th anniversary of the Cluetrain Manefesto called There’s a New Conversation sponsored by The Conversation Group.

It was an early 8:30 am start. Normal for some, for me–not so much. And it was about a 75-90 minute commute provided I didn’t get lost. (For those who don’t know me, I was born without a sense of direction. I’ve been known to get lost even with a GPS device…Hopeless.) Thankfully, traffic was good, the traffic gods were watching over my every directional turn and I got there on time, unscathed. Even after finding a nearby Peet’s and stopping in for quick cup to go.

But I digress.

The event was really well done. Great speakers, content and interaction with the other attendees. When I was back at the office the next day giving Jen Pahlka, GM of Web 2.0 Expo, my quick review, she was so excited that I had finally “found religion” on the whole social media, conversation is the new marketing movement.

It wasn’t like I didn’t get it before. I understood it. I knew I had to embrace it. I just hadn’t been totally bitten by the bug. But now I am. Here’s a quick look at the tidbits of info I gleaned from the conference:

• The customer is the new platform
• Markets are relationships
• The medium is the relationship
• The era of the grand gesture is dead
• Connect on your similarities, profit on your diversities
• Often those with the most customer contact are the ones considered least strategic
• Break down silos, roles that traditional constituencies once played are collapsing
• What’s being said about your brands? Figure it out and join the conversation
• Old world: Messaging used to be given to a few to speak to the market.
• New world: Anyone is a spokesperson
• Customer Network Value: how much one customer can influence others
• Future outlook: people being able to reach companies as quickly and easily as they reach their friends
• Approach to social media should be equal to a product development program
• Have a crisis strategy in advance
• Measurement has changed. It’s not about page views anymore
• Evangelists often don’t have followers. Leaders have followers. Be a leader
• Act like the host of a party, not a cop
• Things that seem inconceivable today are the things you later do to thrive
• Social media is no longer about marketing, it’s how you do business

These are just the thoughts that resonated with me and got me thinking. The organizers did a full blown review of every speaker here.

Why Another Blog?

The last thing the world needs is another blog. But hey. The last thing the world needs is more frozen, high calorie concoctions from Starbucks, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to stop inventing new ones…Hence. My new blog.

Why Marketing Kitty? Because I’m a marketer who happens to have cats? Well, yeah, that’s true.

Hi Moneypenny.

But also because the name was available. And it’s a sort of play on words off my personal blog, Knit Kitty Knit, something started a few years ago when I learned how to knit and wanted to learn how to blog. It’s woefully abandoned at this point — work keeps me a bit too busy to knit, and if you’re not knitting, how do you maintain a blog about knitting?

I run the marketing department for a company that creates and produces conferences and trades shows in the technology space. Web 2.0 Expo, Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Interop, VoiceCon are some of the brands. My current challenge is figuring out what marketing in my group will look like over the next few years. We know what we do today will not be what we’ll do in 2011.

What’s the transition from Marketing 1.0 to Marketing 2.0? How do new social media tools like Facebook, Twitter, etc. get worked into the fabric of our marketing?

This blog is the start of my ramblings in making that transition, marketing in general and reaching out the community for suggestions and advice along the way. I hope you’ll take part.

If you want to follow me on twitter, I’m stacyo.