Balancing the good and the ugly

Feb 05, 2013

It's easy to do the good stuff right, but are we judged more by what we do wrong than what we do right ?
Many organisations are judged favourably by what they do well. And so it should be.But how often is it that far more weight is given to what we do wrong, than what we do right 99% of the time. Two incidents recently gave me cause to ponder.

In December I flew to Austin, Texas, for a trade show. The first leg , with my favourite airline, was to San Francisco. Whenever I have to transit through the USA, I opt for flights via San Francisco if I can. Generally the San Francisco airport experience is far superior to the Los Angeles equivalent. The passage through immigration is somewhat more pleasant in San Francisco than the experience of being treated as an unwelcome alien in Los Angeles. Plus, I don't speak Spanish , which makes LAX even more of a foreign experience.

This time however my flight was late, as were a whole bunch of others, which resulted in queues several hundred metres long to get through immigration. For aliens that is. US citizens had no queues whatsoever.

The bonus of having to wait almost 2 hours to get through immigration is that there would be no wait at the baggage carousel. And there wasn't. As I had fortuitously chosen a line that moved a little faster than some of the others, I came out to a carousel overflowing with bags. But after a few circuits I realised it was overflowing with everyone else's bags. Not mine.

So I had to find the Air New Zealand representative. A nice young lady who looked up the details of my baggage tag on her computer, and told me that my bag had not been loaded in Auckland. They were very sorry and gave me $100 to buy some essentials before my bag arrived on the next flight - the next day.

My visit to Austin may have been to the hometown of Lance Armstrong. But I wasn't going there to visit Lance, I was going on business, and the clothes I had spent the last 24 hours in wouldn't cut it.
I managed to buy myself a new shirt and other essentials before flying on to Austin and my first day's business, expecting my bag to follow me, and be delivered to my hotel- as arranged.

At the end of the first day's meetings, my bag hadn't arrived, so I called Air New Zealand in San Francisco.The person who took my call said he would investigate, and call me back in 10 minutes. Obviously the definition of 10 minutes to Air New Zealand staff in San Francisco is different to mine. I am still awaiting that call back.
The next day however, had a different outcome. Still no bag. So I call Air New Zealand again. This time however, it's not a person I get , but an answerphone. I leave a polite message. No response. And so it goes on for the next 5 days. No bag. Leave a message. No response.

This lack of communication obviously starts to rile me, so I then resort to emailing several Air New Zealand email addresses that I can find , plus calling Air New Zealand in New Zealand. Obviously they were too busy making Hobbit commercials or painting planes black to take the time to get back to me. Or perhaps they just didn't care?

If you subscribe to any of the social media, you will be aware that Air New Zealand put huge efforts into trying to communicate their message. Their twitter feed never lets up with the messages of positive experience from customers - real or otherwise. It's just a pity they can't be bothered with the most basic of communications - actually talking to their customers.

To be fair, an almost identical experience had occurred a few weeks previously. In that case the airline was Swiss International, and the airport Rome. And the difference was that each day the phone was answered, and I was told the bag would arrive that same afternoon. But it didn't, so I got to have the same conversation each day - with a person, not an answerphone.

The phenomenon is obviously not limited to the airline industry.
In January my lawnmower decided to stop mowing. The engine still ran, but the blade to cut the grass didn't engage. So I called the mower shop (they offer a pickup and delivery service).
As I have done before, I left the mower in the driveway (they have a master key) and later that day it had been picked up. A week or so later I called to enquire on progress.

And this is where it gets interesting. I am not normally a subscriber to conspiracy theories.The CIA may well be listening to my every cell phone conversation, but that would mean they were soon sleeping on the job.

But I strongly suspect a conspiracy between mower shops and Air New Zealand. The experiences were bizarrely similar. I called the mower shop to ask if they had made progress in fixing my mower. The first day, I was told that the person who could tell me was out to lunch and would call back in 10 minutes. That's obviously a Californian 10 minutes. The next day the same. And the next next. I am a slow learner, but I worked this one out. So I called at 9.30 am. Surely he couldn't be out to lunch. But he was.

Ten days later, and still no mower, but by now  we could have made enough hay to to keep a good size Waikato dairy herd fed for a dry winter.So I called again. This time I got the workshop manager. The necessary , and obviously elusive, part to make my mower mow again, would be with them tomorrow, and the mower returned the day after. Of course it wasn't.

Another few days go by and I worked up the energy to try calling again. The delivery truck had broken down! Their phone, email and even tin can on a string must have also broken. Not once in the whole sequence of events over the course of nearly a month did said mower shop call or email me.

The statistics tell us that facebook use is starting to fall. I don't wonder. I can't get enthusiastic about knowing what a "friend" had for breakfast this morning, or what antics their pet goldfish got up to last night. Too much is often un-necessary. And very often embarrassing. But it does demonstrate just how easy it can be to communicate - and keep in touch. Mobile phones are ubiquitous. And therefore texts. So is email. And mobile email. A good proportion of the other social media I don't even understand. But Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the like are everywhere, and accessible from everywhere - and enthusiastically embraced by organisations such as Air New Zealand.

More is the pity that it is so easy to tweet and facebook at will about the innocuous, but it is so hard to actually pick up the phone or email and tell the customer what is happening.

Footnote: When I transited in San Francisco on my way back to Auckland my bag was waiting for me.



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