Failing at the New Basics of Customer Care

I had a non-work experience recently that reminded me why what we do in web analytics is more than interesting – it can actually be important. I’m flying to Orlando in May for Unica’s MIS 2010 Conference. In addition to the Conference, we’re going to be doing a Think Tank training day focused on NetInsight. This will be the first time we’ve had a chance to do NetInsight-specific training and it should be exciting.

Since it’s in Orlando, I’m hauling along the kids who are happily engaged in choosing one or two selections from the gaggle of available theme parks. But in booking the ticket to travel to Orlando, I got first-hand experience in why what we in the web analytics field do is important and how companies ignore analytics at their own peril.

Foolishly, I thought Orlando would be relatively easy to fly to – but from San Francisco it really isn’t. United has one direct flight but it’s expensive and the time is very inconvenient. Since I’m planning on bringing out the kids (who’ve never been to DisneyWorld), that’s a bad combination. My airlines of choice, JetBlue and VirginAmerica, had nothing promising.

The cheapest one-stops with decent connections were on AirTran. This isn’t an airline I typically fly, but none of my regular airlines had reasonable prices or connections so I figured I’d give them a chance.

Almost right away, bad things started to happen. Their web site is S...L...O...W – sometimes really, really slow. As I transitioned from Kayak to airtan.com, I found myself waiting on interminable drop-down combo-box populations. Part of the problem was very long waits firing off HBX image requests.

HBX requests? On an airline’s transaction site? Are you kidding me?

But it’s not as if I’m going to fly another airline because they are still running a sunsetted web analytics tool and obviously aren’t monitoring key page load times in the transaction process.

I slug along through the order process (including the maddening $6 seat charge no matter which seat you pick – obviously just a cheap dodge to make their rates seem lower on services like Kayak) and confirm my order.

The site fails. Here’s the message I get:




 
Great. Just great. Nothing like a broken web-site to make you feel good about a company! I just spent nearly half-an-hour plodding through their slow site only to have it fail on confirmation and NOT place my order.

So like a good customer, I call the number provided. Thirty minutes later, I’m finally off hold and talking to a customer service rep who seems about as interested in my problem as my daughters are in the NFL draft. She explains that she has no record of my order and it wasn’t placed on the system. Besides, the web site isn’t down so the problem was probably my fault.

Obviously, this is a company that has never heard of Tealeaf. Tealeaf is built to solve just this sort of problem and also to make sure your web site doesn't stay broken.

So I ask her to book the order for me. She will, but it will be an extra $90 per person – adding nearly $400 to my tab since I’m not booking online!

I point out that I tried booking on line and their site failed.

She helpfully points out that their site is up.

At this point, I give up, hang up, and write a really nasty letter to AirTran customer support (no easy job finding it on their web site either). I send them the error, explain the problem, and tell them they should be doing a much better job with their web site.

Two days later, I get a very nice letter apologizing and explaining that if I try again they will refund any difference between booking now and booking when I first tried it. So I try to book again and what do you know?

The site still fails with the same error message.

So I email them and ask them to call me and take the order.

The next day I get a response telling me that they can’t do that, that I should book on their web site (though I can’t) or book via phone (presumably with another 30 minutes on hold) and then when I get my tickets fax them to them and they will refund the ticket difference.That sounds like fun.

Here’s the actual text (hilarious) of their message:

"We are not currently experiencing a system wide malfunction, therefore, please attempt to access www.airtran.com again, perhaps using a different computer.  Please understand there are many variables that can cause Internet connection problems such as the ones that you experienced.  Due to the de-centralized nature of the internet, access issues are quite often beyond our control."

Keep in mind, I’d sent them the image above showing what is clearly an error on their web site – and I was in direct dialog with a customer service rep not an automated answering service.

So I gave up and booked the tickets on Delta. I paid a little more, but their web site worked and I saved myself what promised to be hours of hair-pulling.

Aside from how frustrating this all was, it also seemed symptomatic of something deeper. Having a current web analytics solution, doing performance monitoring on your transactions and providing Tealeaf to your customer service reps don't guarantee that you’ll deliver good customer service.

But when a company doesn’t invest in what has become the basics of providing decent online customer care, you pretty much know what to expect. I’m highly confident that AirTran’s website is still broken for some combination of browsers/transactions. I’m highly confident it will remain broken because nobody in the company is paying any attention to their customers or their customer’s behaviors.

I know they didn't get my business and I know I'll do my level best to avoid ever having to fly on AirTran - and that's without ever getting a chance to actually travel on one of their planes!

And what are the odds that anybody at AirTran is using BuzzMetrics or Radian6 to monitor blogs and will pick up on this? Slimsky or Nonesky?

It’s hard to provide consistently good customer service. But it’s all too easy to provide bad service. And bad service starts with the failure to measure your website, monitor your page-load and transaction performance, listen to your customers, and give your customer service reps the tools they need to identify and resolve online problems. Companies like AirTran that are batting an O'fer on this list are in the worst possible place - they don't even have the tools to realize how bad things actually are!

Comments

[Katie Morse]

Wow. First off, thanks for the Radian6 mention. Second, that sounds like an AWFUL experience. I travel quite frequently and can't remember the last time I used AirTran.