An Endangered Species -- Customer Service!

The front-page article headline in our Atlanta Business Chronicle reads “Delta Under Fire For Frequent Flier Change.” The article goes on to say that there will be fewer award seats and that Delta will be passing on a surcharge for the tickets.

Wow!

The headline ought to actually read: “Delta’s Post Chapter 11 Team Stupidly Forgets Who Pilots The Airline.”

The President running Delta, Ed Bastian is also the CFO – the bean-counter.

Ed was previously vice president of finance and controller and was promoted to senior vice president in February 2000. In his online bio, it says that Ed “guided Delta through profit improvement initiatives garnering $5 billion in cost savings and revenue benefits between 2002 and 2004.”

On September 14, 2005, Delta filed for Chapter 11.

Atlanta consumer advocate and WSB talk-show host Clark Howard talked about Delta’s decision on-air and made the comment that “the real trend in the industry is to just make fun of people.”

Ed is probably a very nice person…he probably also has an MBA degree from a top business school.

And Ed is not doing stupid things like this alone.

This past week, I went through a nightmare experience with the management team at Best Buy and my purchase of a washer and dryer. When I called customer service at the store, all I heard was a defense of the mistake. When I called the 1-800-number for customer service, I got a repeat performance.

BrandVenture recently conducted some customer in-store encounter surveys for a retail client to find out why a couple of markets had declining sales despite increased national chain sales.

The best news from the study?

Despite the lack of customer dialogue, despite counter clerks walking away from customer in the midst of their orders, and despite delays in receiving product, the customers still loved the product.

It’s simple. Service today sucks.

If we were in a product-driven economy, everyone from Ralph Nader and Consumer Reports to the FTC and FDA would be screaming, the press would be hounding Wall Street, and Business Schools would be driving home a message of product quality and product safety.

Airlines, banks, cable providers, phone companies, retailers… how many times in an average day do you think that they say the phrase “I’m sorry”? How many times do you think they say the phrase “Let’s make it work”?

Hey Ed and the rest of you CFOs running businesses today…the value of the Brand Experience is what drives the bottomline, not the bean-counters.

And in a service-driven economy, the Brand Experience is delivered in REAL TIME…even before the product arrives home and you take it out of the box.