Lessons in customer service from my Xmas getaway

My son and I just enjoyed a few days of sunshine, good food and great customer service at a Caribbean resort. Our journey home made for a jarring return to reality thanks to the more than fifty degree drop in outside temperature but also due to the poor customer service provided by the airline.

For my last post of 2017, I thought I’d share one bouquet and two brickbats in the hopes of encouraging more of the former and a lot less of the latter in 2018.

Our resort is one which we’ve visited once before a year and a half back. A few months before our trip, I’d dropped a note to the front office manager letting her know that we were coming back and providing her with a few requests. I was not expecting that we’d be treated any different than any other guest given that we’d spent less than a week during our last stay. Not only did they upgrade us to a higher tier room, they also left a fruit plate, a cheese plate and a decent bottle of rum in our room along with inviting us to a repeat guests cocktail reception midway through our stay. Sure, the cost of these bonuses is a fraction of what we spent for our stay, but this thoughtfulness did a great job of cementing my loyalty.

Delighters, like recognition, don’t need to be big.

The inbound flight for our journey home was delayed a half hour due to bad weather in the Greater Toronto Area. The ground and flight crew made fast work of getting our plane ready for the return flight and we departed with just a slight schedule variance on the scheduled departure time. However, once we landed, we spent an hour on the runway waiting for a delayed plane from a different airline to free up our gate. Through this process, the flight crew did a good job of providing us with updates.

Unfortunately, things went downhill from there.

Once our gate was available, we spent an additional forty-five minutes waiting for ground crew from the third-party provider contracted by our airline to provide these services. Few updates were provided by the flight crew and they took every opportunity to pass the buck for the issue to their service provider.

When a customer buys the sausage, they rarely care to know how that sausage was made, just that it tastes good and meets quality requirements!

Once we had de-planed and made our way through immigration to the luggage carousels, things didn’t improve. We waited an hour for bags to start showing up but none came. A few of us made our way to the luggage enquiries desk and requested an update from the airline’s agent there. Upon our request she called her duty manager who tried to get a hold of baggage services (again contracted by the airline) without success. Once again, the airline’s agent tried to defer ownership of the issue, first to her duty manager and then to the third party service provider. Repeated requests to have her duty manager (who was at the airport – somewhere) to come down were ignored.

More than three hours after we landed our bags finally arrived.

Issues will occur but how your company handles them when they do is what your customers will remember. Training staff to avoid the blame game and ensuring that someone empowered to make decisions shows up in person can turn a public relations nightmare into a minor blip.