Slashdot Mirror
A New Way to Tell Your Airline You Hate It (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Airlines -- an industry not known for stellar customer interactions -- are joining the party, and not just to break the bad news about your flight. They're inviting you to ask questions, and maybe even complain. Two airlines have dipped their wings into the waters of two-way texting. Hawaiian Holdings's Hawaiian Airlines is adding the feature while JetBlue Airways took a stake in a software startup that will allow its call center staff to start texting customers in the coming months. Texting, technically called SMS (which stands for short message service), is arguably the world's most favored form of communication, but much of corporate America has been slow to adapt. The few that have -- including Verizon Wireless retailers, British telecom company Sky UK, and Nestle SA's frozen foods division -- are dwarfed by an array of local commerce, from insurance agents, veterinarians, air conditioning techs, and auto dealers who have already jumped in to conduct their business.
There's a rule of thumb about voter feedback to Congresscritters. A hand-written letter is worth about 10 phone calls. A phone call is worth about 10 faxes. And a fax is worth about 10 emails.
The idea is that the more effort you had to put into the feedback, the more you must care about the issue. If your level of concern is so low that you can only be bothered to type in your name and email address on a website form letter and click "send", then the issue must not be very important to you. OTOH if you take the type to write a letter by hand and physically mail it to your representative, the issue must be very important to you, and they'll treat it as such.
Same goes here. If your complaint with the airline can only get you to expend enough effort to shoot off a text, then your level of outrage must be very low. They're not going to treat it very seriously. If it gets you to write a nasty (non-form) email, your level of outrage must be higher and they'll take you a bit more seriously. If you're outraged enough to call them and suffer the wait time on hold, then they'll take you even more seriously. And if you spent the time to write a hand-written letter and paid for a stamp to mail it to them, you must really be angry with them, and they'll take your letter very seriously.
So championing the easiest-to-use form of feedback isn't really the best way to get your complaint heard by the higher-ups.
Aviation is one of the industries where the customer is almost never right. You don't know what happened, and you don't know what you're talking about.
"That door is open," it does that.
"That engine is turning," wind.
"The engine is clanking," wind.
"There's a hole in the wing," there's supposed to be.
"There's a fuel leak," it's water.
"That other plane was REALLY close," no it wasn't.
"That turbulence was REALLY bad, is the plane ok?" It was light turbulence, you'll break before the plane does.
"You didn't do a run up, you're supposed to do one," no we're not.
"Nice landing," actually it was terrible.
"Wow, that was a bad landing," actually it was perfect.
"The flaps aren't set for takeoff," yes they are.
"You took off too close behind that plane," no we didn't.
I could go all day.