Good Examples of Bad Customer Service

It takes so little effort to provide good customer service and yet so many companies like to get it wrong. A few examples, one that's a year or so old and another that happened just a few days ago.

A year or so ago, I was visiting a client in Houston, from Dallas. The price difference between the airline I normally fly and Continental Airlines was about $150, so it made sense, from the client's perspective (if not mine) to fly Continental. It was an overnight trip, so I had carry on luggage only - a small suitcase and my computer bag. I don't fly Continental very often, so I don't have much status with their frequent flier programs. As a result, I was in the last group to board. There were about 10 people left to board when a Continental flight officer, with a roll-aboard, a Jeppson case (the big cases they carry for charts, logs, etc) and a computer bag comes down the outside of the line and cuts in front of one of the passengers waiting at the door.

A few minutes later it's my turn to board but a flight attendent stops me and tells me that there is no more overhead space left, so they will have to check my bag. Now, this has happened on my favorite airline, but when it does, they put it in the cargo hold then bring it back up to me on the jetway. I ask the Continental flight attendent if that's how they handle it. No, she tells me, I will have to wait 20 minutes in Houston for my luggage to get off-loaded. I tell her it's just the one bag, couldn't she put it in the crew closet. Nope.

As she write out the tag I mention that I didn't think my preferred airline would have done that and she replied that perhaps I should have taken them!

Once on the plane, I notice that the flight officer who jumped the line isn't actually in the cockpit, he's in a aisle seat across from me. An hour later, after we land, he stands and opens the overhead bin and pulls out his bag, his Jeppson case and his computer bag. He didn't store anything under the seat and, indeed, took up the space of two passengers (who are only allowed two items in the first place).

On the ground, I go to the gate agent and ask for a manager. After 10 minutes, one arrives. I tell her the story and she smiles and says "So what would you have Continental do?" I told her that I wouldn't inconvienance a revenue paying passenger over a dead-heading pilot. They could have checked my bag with the flight crews, or they could have (should have) made the dead-heading pilot check his. With that, she wishes me a pleasant stay in Houston and moves on. After a 10 minute walk in the airport and the 10 minutes waiting for and talking with the manger, I thought that at least I wouldn't have to wait for the bag. Wrong. It was another 10 minutes until the bag showed up.

I've flown at least 20 times since. Not once on Continental. I won't willingly fly them again.

The other good example of bad customer service happened this last week while some we (my family and the family of a good friend) were doing a post-Thanksgiving tour of Texas Hill Country vineyards.  In Fredricksburg, Texas - the heart of Hill Country - we finally located the Fredricksburg Winery.  Almost immediately I knew it wasn't going to be fun, since they featured not wine but curious and wine-related gifts at the front of the store, along with some poor quality art.

With us were our two childern - my 11 year old daughter and their 12 year old son.  They are both very well behaved and had spent most of the trip out doors, kicking a soccer ball around while we tasted and bought wine. In the Fredricksberg store they both went to look for gift items while we, the parents, drifted back to the tasting table in the back of the room.  There a woman nodded to our kids and told us that they couldn't wander around the store - it was a state law since they had open wine.  That's a bold lie right there.  The only open wine was in her reach on the tasting table and they had a 17 year old girl stocking bottles.  So we asked the kids to move closer, to a table with books on it, about 8 feet from us.  The lady started to explain the wines, for the most part sweet because, as she said "That's what a lot of Texan's drink."  I leaned over to my wife and whispered "I'm ready to leave now" but she wanted to see what they had.  The kids had moved to another table about 12 feet away and the lady stopped her pitch and said "I'm sorry, you really need to have your kids with you...they can't move around the store like that." 

That was it for all of us.  I said, out loud, "I'm ready to leave" and we all headed to the door. 

So, let's summarize.  The lady lied about state law.  She lumped us in with "Texans who like sweet wines." And she made an assumption that our children were not well enough behaved to be out of arms reach in the store.  Customer service failure on several levels.  We bought about five cases of wine on our trip.  Not one from Fredricksburg Winery.  We'll never go in that store again.

Rhodia Weekly 2010 Planner

I received my Rhodia Weekly Planner (by Quo Vadis) that I ordered from The Daily Planner a few days ago. I had originally ordered it in black but they were out of stock (as they seem to be for every item I have ever bought from them). Orange is not a favorite color but if you are going to buy Rhodia products, you get used to it.

The cover is deeply embossed with the year (2010) and the Rhodia logo. At first I thought the paper felt a little thin and more "toothy" then the paper in all the other Rhodia products I have, but after spending more time with it, it is fine. The paper is stitched in and the cover is flexible, so it's pocketable.

Inside, there is a page to write personal information like your phone numbers, email, web addresses and emergency contact information. Included is a space for your social security number! That's very thoughtful of them! Identity thieves will very much appreciate that feature for anyone naive enough to fill it out.

There is also a 2010 calender, with an assortment of US and internation holidays labeled.

The actual agenda section uses two pages for the week. On the left side is the space for Monday through Saturday, from 8am to 7pm in two columns, with each entry giving you about 1.5 inches (4 cm) space to write in. Vertical spacing is about a sixteenth of an inch (4 mm), so people with small printing or writing (like myself) will be okay. For others, hopefully your appointments cover two hours. That's not a big deal for me and I doubt it will be for others.

The big suprise to me was that the lines were not the medium blue I am used to from Rhodia, but a light grey. That includes the lines on the Notes grid on the right side of the page.

After the agenda, there is a 2011 planning calendar and an old fashioned address book section.

On the back cover is the now obligatory elastic band to keep everything together

I go through phases with agendas - part of me wants to use it because I really like paper and pen and the act of writing it down makes it easier to remember. The other part of me wants to use the technology. I have a laptop and a smartphone I can easily use to set up appoints and take notes. But I still like writing it down.

Another blog?

Just what we need, right? And what's this one going on about? Little blue squares? I originally thought I would concentrate on things like paper and pens but I have decided to branch out and include other items of (my) interest and hope that someone thinks it's interesting too.

So why "Little Blue Squares"? I like quadrille paper. Some would say I obsess about it. I was thinking about that on my run this morning - my earliest memory of seeing quadrille paper. I was in my early teens. It was a French movie, I can't recall title or actors or even the plot. It was old, in black and white and shot in the late 50's or early 60's. At one point, the well dressed young hero of the movie reaches into the inside pocket of his suit coat and takes out a little notebook and opens it to quadrille lined pages and writes a note. I remember thinking that it was a cool notebook and that I would like one.

My dad traveled a lot and I asked him, on his next trip to Europe, if he would try to find something like that. Sadly, he thought that a client's give-away date book would do and while it was nice, it wasn't the same.

Here's some background. I am left handed. Sort of. I eat left handed and when I used to smoke, I smoked left handed. Most other things, I do right handed. But I write left handed. When I was going to school, they taught the Palmer method. My elementary school teachers didn't know how to teach that to a lefty, so they didn't try. As a result, I had awful handwriting. I remember thinking, when I saw that notebook, that it would help me have better handwriting because the little blue squares would help with spacing and height.

My handwriting was so bad that for years, I didn't use script. Certainly when I was in the Navy, copying intercepted communications, I never used script. My supervisors prohibited it once they saw my handwriting. So I printed. In the Navy style, I just printed everything as block, capital letters. The initial capitals were just slightly larger than the rest. I was pretty good at that, fast and neat and in later years, it evolved into "connected printing" which was readable and faster. I would have never got through graduate school without that.

Once I started using quadrille paper (which was almost universally called "graph" paper then) when I was in undergraduate school, I never stopped. But finding quadrille in any size other than 8 1/2 x 11 inches was almost impossible in the US. No pocket notebooks were available. I even when I went to a printer to see about having some made, but the cost was prohibitive, even to someone as obsessive about as I was.

Years later, as my fiance (now my wife) and I were planning our honeymoon trip to the Caribbean. We didn't want to go to St. Thomas or Jamaica - after a lot of research we decided on St. Martin, a half-Dutch, half-French island near Anguilla. And that's when I looked up papeterie, the French word for a stationary store.

I found one, in Marigot, the capital city of the French side and I spent a lot of time there. There, in this one busy little store, were all the quadrille I wanted. Plus pens, like blister-pack Watermans, and Pentel Ball B50s, a distinctly European roller ball that looks cool, so I bought a handfull of them. Then I discovered I can't write with them. It only writes well at a pretty upright angle - like a right handed person uses.

I do distinctly recall the US Customs agent in New York looking at our customs declaration and saying, in a questioning voice, "Ninety bucks on stationary items?"