Still steamed about US Airways, but I made a ninja play and we’ll see what happens.
In the meantime, let me ask you this:
Who has exceptionally good customer service? What are the absolute BEST customer service experiences you’ve ever had that immediately destroyed the competitors’ chances of winning you over?
This would be funny if it wasn’t me.
I’d booked Flight 1091 at 6:30 AM out of Boston to Dayton, Ohio for the Stephen K. Hayes Full Moon of May meditation seminar. Everything seemed fine – e-ticket booked, confirmation email received (Travel Confirmation: B4P74G, ticket 03721357878361, passenger name Christopher Penn in case anyone from US Airways eventually reads this), etc. I get to Logan Airport this morning an hour and change before my flight is supposed to depart, great. Get to the self-service counter to check in, and the machine says, “No seats could be found for this reservation number. Please try again.” A couple more tries of this, and the machine finally spits back, “No seats could be found for this reservation number. Please see an agent at the booking counter.”
Of course, being Memorial Day weekend, the lines were on the long side, so after a 40 minute wait in line (getting really worried because the flight’s leaving SOON), I see an agent who brusquely tells me, “I’m sorry, we have no record of your reservation.”
[insert profanity here]
After expressing things internally, I said, “Okay, so there’s no ticket even though I booked one. When’s the next flight to Dayton?”
“4:30 PM, getting in at 9 PM.”
Not much good that will do me, since the 2 day seminar begins at 1 PM and concludes the first day at 9 PM. I head home after cancelling a bunch of reservations and calling my teacher to let him know briefly of the foul-up.
When I got home, my wife urged me to call the airline and get a refund. So I called them up – 480-693-6735. The audio voice response unit kept telling me to submit a refund request online, and then when I queued up to speak to a customer service agent, the helpful prompt said, “Due to unexpectedly high call volume, your estimated wait time is 47 minutes.”
I bailed out of there, unwilling to wait 3/4 of an hour on the phone, and instead headed online to submit an electronic refund request. Here’s the email response I got:
Thank you for submitting your refund request via e-mail. We are experiencing an increase in customer e-mail and are working diligently to respond to all inquiries; however it could take between 45 and 60 days to review your request. If this schedule will not provide a timely response, please contact our Refund Department directly at 480-693-6735. When calling, please have your 13-digit ticket number beginning with either 037 or 401 available.
Your refund request is subject to additional audit and final approval by the US Airways Refund Department. All refunds are credited to the form of payment of the original ticket.
Thank you for choosing US Airways.
I’m sorry, 45 to 60 DAYS to review an email? I could send the email by carrier pigeon one word at a time faster than that.
Needless to say, I’m beyond pissed at US Airways for terminally poor customer service, and on top of that, I don’t anticipate getting a refund without a struggle, which I’m not looking forward to.
I’m most amused by the closer: Thank you for choosing US Airways. Yeah, that’s a mistake I won’t make again.
US Airways, and any airline that’s currently worried about staying in business, here’s a tip: if your business is in trouble, improving the quality of your customer service is the only thing that will save you. Take your entire marketing budget – all of it – and dump it all into customer service, because frankly, that’s where you need the most help. Pay your staff to not be surly, or hire people who aren’t surly, figure out a way to communicate with customers that doesn’t involve hold times approaching geological epochs, and make your damn computers work correctly.
Here’s my last bit of petty revenge. According to the web site, the customer service fax number is 800-892-3447.
FAX: 800-892-3447
I hope junk fax spam bots send you Caribbean vacation offers endlessly. May the junk faxes and scams all use US Airways to book their fraudulent, non-existant offers.
us airways
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Epilogue: US Airways eventually extended me a credit for the flight… and a $150 fee to use it. #!@# you, US Airways. I’m glad to see this post is #4 when you Google US Airways customer service.
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I’ve been a part of a project called Virtual Hot Wings, which is a fan-generated virtual CD for indie musician Matthew Ebel, who you’ve heard on the podcast a whole lot. I respect Matthew greatly for being a fantastic musician AND for breaking out on his own to do what he loves most, and helped with the creation of this CD. Here’s what is on it:
It’s available at https://www.VirtualHotWings.com right now.
Please buy a copy of Virtual Hot Wings. It supports an independent musician and absolutely every penny/Linden goes to him, no middlemen. This distribution model has the potential to help indie musicians everywhere earn a living doing what they do best, and what we love them most for – playing music.
Check out the press release here.
After the shootings on April 16, 2007, I watched as communities formed and reformed in the aftermath of the tragedy in Blacksburg. One of the most impressive and touching efforts was the For Today We Are All Hokies A Cappella tribute CD, put together by college a cappella groups across the Commonwealth of Virginia. It’s a damn good CD – all of the groups are professional quality, and the CD is a worthy buy. Two disc set for $20, proceeds go to the Hokie Memorial Fund.
For Today We Are All Hokies… a proud new member in my collection.
(crossposted to the Financial Aid Podcast blog)
Steve from the Wicked Good Podcast points us all to this LA Times article. Short version: the RIAA wants more money, and is tired of radio freeloading off of its content library. They want to extract performance royalties from terrestrial radio just as they want for every other form of media in which their artists are played.
To which I say:
You go, RIAA! Please, please, PLEASE demand money from radio stations. Please ask for as much money as you can in your demands from ClearChannel. Please make terrestrial radio PAY!
Why?
Because this could be a major opportunity for both podcasting and podsafe musicians. Working together, working as a coalition, we can offer terrestrial radio an alternative to paying huge bills from the RIAA. The arrangement is as clear as day – free play for free promotion. I’ll tell you as a podcaster, and I’ll put it out here publicly, that terrestrial radio stations may play the Financial Aid Podcast free of charge. I hereby waive the non-commercial clause of the Creative Commons license for any FCC-licensed terrestrial radio station. Please play my stuff.
For podsafe artists – NOW would be a great time to make sure your EPK is looking great. Now would be a great time to make sure that your marketing and sales teams are on hot standby, because if the RIAA successfully overturns the federal exemption on performance royalties, simple economics will favor the podsafe independent artist over the RIAA-signed artist, but you’ve got to have your stuff together, your quality as good or better than what’s currently on commercial radio, and have pre-drafted paperwork for radio stations.
As with many empires, the downfall of the music industry empire must come from within, and they’re doing a bang up job. Thanks, guys.
I was talking last night with a good friend about something that popped up in Google Earth. There’s a layer that automatically got added – the crisis in Darfur, all the flashpoints in the conflict, and the topic drifted to – how do you make a difference? Ultimately, how do you effect real, lasting change? Will donating? Writing your Congressman?
Ultimately, the ability to effect change is power. Without power, you cannot effect change, you cannot make a difference. If you have a little bit of power, you can make a little bit of change. If you have a lot, then you can singlehandedly change entire countries or continents. Consider at his apex just how powerful Alan Greenspan was – a single sentence could rocket or sink the economy for days, and create or destroy billions of dollars in wealth.
That tangent led us to the discussion of power vs. morality. They’re not the same thing, and in the drive in this morning, it finally occurred to me what they were. Morality is the direction you go – the way you steer. Morality is the gas and the engine that takes you there. No power means that you can steer as straight and true as you like, but you won’t get anywhere. No morality means that you can head off the road really, really fast.
You need both. Ideally, morality and moral guidance for most people is more or less in place; the trick then is to stay on target, stay on the road while you learn how to build power. That’s the harder part of the equation. We live in a society that actively encourages the bulk of citizens to NOT become more powerful, to forfeit their power to government, business, leaders, demagogues, zealots, religion, and so forth. You hear the pleas for the surrender of your power every day:
– Buy this product and you’ll be happy.
– Elect me to office and I’ll fix your problems.
– Worship this deity and you’ll go to heaven.
– Trust me with this decision and I’ll reward you.
The powers that be don’t want to steer you off the road. They want you to stop driving entirely.
How do you resist giving up what power and steering you have?
Clarence Smith Jr. of 42minus71.org and Do You Know Clarence?, was asking recently about his show, Do You Know Clarence? Truth? No, I don’t – but it’s not what you think.
In ninjutsu, a technique you look at today will look different in a year’s time, in a decade’s time, and when you finally retire from training. One of my teachers compares it to a chalk mark on a wheel. As the wheel rolls, the mark might look like it’s at the same spot again after one rotation, but the wheel has traveled some distance in that time.
One of the worst mistakes to make with any technique is to say you know it, to say you’ve got it, because you effectively close yourself off from learning more about it, from being free to revisit it in a day’s time, a year’s time, or a lifetime. That same technique, as your skills improve, opens up to reveal more and more secrets, like building a staircase on the fly. Every step you build raises you higher and lets you see more, even if the technique of adding one stair on top of another is relatively the same.
Do I know Clarence? Nope. I don’t want to, either. I want to be open to learn more about Clarence. I want to be free to be surprised, amazed, and shocked by the things that I’ll learn about him in the years to come. To say I know him is to imply that he’s told me everything, and not only hasn’t he, but he can’t. There are some things you just can’t explain. I don’t want to know Clarence, but that doesn’t mean I won’t subscribe to his blog or podcast or new media ventures, because I do – and that’s the first step to learning more.
Do YOU know Clarence? As Clarence says, let it marinate.
“If you’re not a born-again Christian, you’re a failure as a human being.”
“God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve.”
“I put all the blame legally and morally on the actions of the terrorist, [but America’s] secular and anti-Christian environment left us open to our Lord’s [decision] not to protect. When a nation deserts God and expels God from the culture … the result is not good.”
“AIDS is not just God’s punishment for homosexuals; it is God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.”
“Blow them all away in the name of the Lord.”
Jerry Falwell, boy am I glad you’re dead. You nearly singlehandedly turned a fine religion into a fundamentalist, greed and hate-based one, and oh yeah, you took it to the bank along the way, collecting over $200 million a year on the backs and name of Jesus Christ. If I were Christian, I’d probably be praising the Lord right now. As a Buddhist with a strong belief in karma, I can’t wait to see what you come back as.
A lot of folks on the cutting edge have already written off MySpace and headed to different online communities. This is perfectly understandable – MySpace has been plagued with spyware, usability issues, and an image problem that Madison Avenue firms would cringe at. The cutting edge has left, and the hip crowd has left for greener pastures.
So, who’s left?
Everyone else. MySpace is over its Dip, if you’re a Seth Godin follower, and is gaining widespread, mainstream adoption. When the cashier at the supermarket, when the 47 year old account, when the woman on the street is talking about MySpace, it’s hit the mainstream, and the reality is that the bulk of your market – unless it’s cutting edge technologists – is in the mainstream.
Now is the time to refocus your MySpace marketing efforts. The bots and scripts are slowly coming back, the service is more aggressive about spam, and the numbers of mainstream users are swelling every day. As of this morning, approximately 4 profiles were being added PER SECOND.
Marketing to MySpace members now also needs to take a more mainstream-friendly approach. If you’re a podcaster, telling people to copy your RSS feed’s URL won’t fly with the mainstream crowd. One click is the limit – make it so easy for your new MySpace audience to get to what you have to offer.
If you follow powerlaw distributions, about 80% of your potential audience is in the mainstream, and they’re just arriving at the party now. Late to the party, perhaps, but they’re bringing spending money, and at the end of the day, that’s what counts most.
In talking with a friend tonight, I posed the question:
“What do you feed your brain with?”
Power comes from within you. True, there’s a lot to be said for things like money and Rolodexes, power lunches, etc. but these are outward symbols of what’s going on inside your mind. The conversation got me to thinking about some of the things I fuel my brain with, and that in turn got me thinking about publishing a list of some of my favorite pieces of brain food. All of the food below is free to access!
1. Mitch Joel at PodCamp Toronto – Building your personal brand. This is a 45 minute video that is worth paying for, but amazingly is free. If you finish watching this and your personal sense of identity is not refined, you need to watch it again.
2. Malcolm Gladwell on Spaghetti Sauce – TED conference. A great session that gets you thinking about choice and happiness.
3. Julien Smith discusses SEO – a great primer and refresher on the basics of search optimization. If you have any desire to understand the real power behind monetization and podcasting, then you need to listen to this episode of Canadian Podcast Buffet.
4. Managing the Gray with C.C. Chapman – a great marketing podcast that will get you thinking about new media.
5. New Comm Road with Bryan Person – a far more tactical perspective of the tools of new media, with techniques and specifics for implementation.
6. Tony Robbins at TED – another great video on what makes human beings tick. Tony’s legendary in the human performance community and his stuff is ALWAYS worth watching.
7. Stephen K. Hayes. Master instructor, master practitioner of ninjutsu, just about everything he does and creates is instantly usable and worthwhile. Some stuff will take a decade or so to marinate. His speech, Faces in the Mandala, is a must-read.
My good friend Chel also reminds us that there’s great music to be had all over the place that is a profound source of inspiration as well. That is an entirely different blog post.
