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.