An Open Letter to American Airlines Chairman Gerard Arpey

Here's an excerpt of a letter I wrote following an abysmal experience I had with AA. There are a lot of lessons for a B2B marketer in this (summarized at the bottom). Enjoy!

Dear Mr. Gerard J. Arpey,

Since I read in American Way (your in-flight magazine), that you wanted to hear from customers about how you’re doing, I thought I’d share my story.

My outbound flight from San Francisco to Boston was just as I like it, uneventful. On time, pleasant, and rather unremarkable. I wish I could say the same about the return. After what seemed like quite a long time with no pre-boarding announcements, I went to check the monitor only to discover that my flight to Chicago (where I was to catch a connecting flight to San Francisco) had been cancelled.

As word spread amongst the awaiting crowd of passengers, a single flight attendant arrived with no information. She politely informed me that she had just found out and was going to try to find some information. At this stage, all of the passengers were becoming incredibly nervous and agitated. She returned approximately ten minutes later with pieces of paper expressing the airlines apologies for the cancellation and a phone number to call to rearrange travel.

I made several attempts to reach your call center via this 1800 number only to be further disappointed by the fact that your speech recognition system wouldn’t allow me to speak to an agent by pressing zero or saying “agent” until I had provided it with various pieces of information.

I was eventually able to get through to a call center agent who was sympathetic and tried to get me on a USAir flight via Las Vegas, only to have the line cut half way through the process.

Finally, two ground agents arrived. Given the fact that the flight was full, I would suggest a few more than two ground agents to deal with the now angry mob (see photo attached). When I finally reached the desk along with a fellow San Francisco-bound traveler (at the end of the line consequently because I had stepped out of line to better hear the call center agent!), I was not greeted by an apologetic representative of your airline, but rather a rude and somewhat unpleasant person.

Now I will admit that my own attitude was not 100% helpful at that stage, but I was the one being inconvenienced! If you are going to work in a service role, you are going to have to expect that people are going to be less than thrilled when you tell them that first of all they aren’t going to get home anywhere near the time that they had intended to and secondly that because it is due to weather it is “not the airlines fault” and therefore your accommodation will not be covered.

I arrived back at the airport the following morning, boarded a direct flight to SFO, and finally made it home around 24 hours later than I had initially planned.

So following are my suggestions for how to handle these types of incidents in the future (by the way these hold true for a lot of businesses!):

1. Deliver bad news personally. Your passengers are customers and should be treated as such. It’s a relationship – if you have something bad to tell me, cowboy up and have the decency to send a human person to deliver the news. If you don’t have enough info yet, then don’t post the news. (If you're a B2B marketer, this means your customers should get bad news from you directly, not the 11 o'clock news, WSJ, CNET, etc.)

2. Make sure your customer service reps are prepared to deal with angry people. Telling a passenger whose flight has just been cancelled and who has requested that you call a flight (which is leaving in five minutes) and asking them to hold it “You must be kidding me,” is not acceptable. You have to expect that people who have personal and professional lives which are being impacted in ways you cannot imagine are going to make ridiculous requests. All that your staff can control is how reasonably THEY react. But snide remarks like that have NO place in a customer service interaction.

3. Get your stories straight. If the party line is, “Bad weather in Chicago,” then make sure that everyone is getting that message. It’s disconcerting to be told one thing and then another. It feels like you’re being lied to, and we don’t like that.

4. Try to do something to help your customers out. I don’t care that it’s not your fault that the flight was cancelled. You have an obligation to at the very least try to help me out. You could have easily had one customer service person make a few calls to nearby hotels and ask that they extend a discount rate to everyone who shows their boarding pass upon check-in. I mean, you’re an airline for crying out loud. You have relationships with hotels near the airport and all over Boston.

5. Amend your voice self-service system or have an alternate number for cancelled flights. I find it comical that your call center only allows speech recognition. I mean the people who are probably the most in need of speaking to an agent are the ones for whom the speech reco system will not work, because they are in a noisy airport! I realize that this is all a cost cutting measure (and I used to work for Genesys who probably sold you the software), but you have to have a reasonable response to an issue like this.

6. Add some peanuts back to the flights! I know that you sell sandwiches now, but come on. It’s a six hour flight – you can’t at least throw me a bag of peanuts. Unbelievable.

And one final note – your customer relations site online only allows 1500 characters for email submissions! Definitely not enough space to write this whole sad story. You might want to change that.

So that’s my feedback – do with it what you will. But keep in mind, your customers are people. We understand that stuff happens. But it’s how you handle the stuff that really defines who you are as a company and a brand. I’ll definitely remember this interaction next time I go to book a flight anywhere and think twice about flying on AA.

Sincerely,

Tricia Reilly