• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, January 7, 2011

Writing about customer service is inherently paradoxical in today's totally connected online world: if you have any kind of platform to get your musings or complaints heard through social media, there's a good chance you'll be able to get someone from the company in question to help you, if only to avert bad publicity. But this is not really good customer service -- it's good public relations, a related but definitely separate discipline.

After all, the point of customer service is that it should be good no matter what, whether or not anyone will notice, and regardless of whether someone is threatening to make a stink or not using social media (anyone who wishes to argue with this assertion is welcome to do so in the comments section, but I would ask that they sign their comment with their real name and the company they work for). As customers, we shouldn't be obliged to submit every customer service interaction to the great all-seeing eye of the social Web just to get a reaction. It's great that regular folks now have this leverage, of course, but forcing them to use it utterly defeats the point of customer service -- which is to be good and helpful, not bad and infuriating, right out of the gate.

However, some big companies just aren't getting the message -- and there is a price to be paid. Having confused customer service with PR on the Web, they will now have to deal with bad PR on the Web from people who didn't try to get their customer service issues resolved through social media -- who rather tried, stupidly and naively, to get them resolved through traditional customer service channels. In short, I am here today to bring some bad PR to a very deserving victim.

At some point, any discussion of bad customer service must naturally turn to the airline industry, which invented it. I don't deny that flying millions of people around on thousands of planes is a complicated, challenging business, and there's no way airlines can be responsible for everything that might go wrong, especially factors like inclement weather. Yet they are presumably somewhat in control of how they react to these outside, external events, including how they deal with passengers affected by them.

I was inspired to write this about the good PR accruing to the airlines for their super-savvy, tech-oriented, Web 4.3.9 customer service strategy during the winter storm which walloped the Northeast over the holidays, shutting down major airports and stranding passengers for days at a time. The New York Times reported that for many passengers, "Twitter might be the best way to book a seat home," adding that "savvy travelers were able to book new reservations, get flight information and track lost luggage. And they could complain, too." The NYT paid particular attention to Delta Airlines, which had "nine agents with special Twitter training" working in "rotating shifts to help travelers."

Wow, that is so cool. Of course, the same NYT article noted that "the airlines' reservation lines required hours of waiting -- if people could get through at all." So really, the article isn't about good customer service: it's about uneven customer service, which is really just another way of saying bad customer service, since one of the principles of customer service (to my mind) should be treating everyone the same. Why should people who use Twitter get better, faster service than someone calling on the phone? And in fact, this disparity is embarrassing, if not downright disgraceful, when you consider that phone-based customer service has been around for decades, while Twitter has only been around for a few years. It's terrific that they're good at using Twitter, but the real question is: why are they still so bad at using the telephone?

And it's not just the phone: real, live human beings, in face-to-face situations, are even worse. The real inspiration for this post came weeks before the winter storm or the NYT article, when I flew Delta -- hopefully for the last time -- over Thanksgiving. Basically, the Delta counter staff at LAX turned what's normally a slow but bearable experience into a bizarre, Kafkaesque ordeal.

I arrived at the Delta terminal at LAX an hour and a quarter before my flight was scheduled to leave on the morning of November 19, leaving me half an hour to check in for my flight. I didn't have any bags to check, so it should have been easy. I first tried to check in using one of the self-service kiosks. But the machine couldn't check me in, and instructed me to go talk to a Delta (human) counter representative; I still had 25 minutes left to check in before the 45-minute cutoff -- not great, but doable.

At the counter a handful of human representatives were standing in a manner to suggest they were there to help the growing line of would-be passengers standing directly in front of them. Five minutes passed, then ten, with no forward motion. Another five minutes, and no one moved from the front of the line to the counter; no one behind the counter looked up or gave any indication that they were aware of the line of people waiting to be helped. A small foreign family stood by the counter off to one side, seemingly imprisoned by their giant rollaway bags. Stillness; eerie silence.

After about 15 minutes in line, having observed no forward motion and indeed no activity of any kind, I began to grow agitated: I now had about five minutes to check in for my flight before the 45-minute cutoff. Muttered commiserations with other would-be passengers who were about to miss their flights confirmed that something was seriously wrong. At the same time, I was reaching that unfortunate social breaking point where adherence to group rules -- like waiting in line -- begins to seem less important. Desperate, I just walked up to one of the counter reps, who looked up from her computer with great reluctance.

After hearing my story, she advised me it was too late to check any luggage for my flight, which was now -- as she spoke -- scheduled to depart in 47 minutes.

"I'm not trying to check any luggage. I just need to check in for my flight, and the 45-minute cutoff is coming up!"

She looked puzzled: "Well why don't you just check in at the kiosks?"

I told her I couldn't; finally understanding the problem, she volunteered, "I'm leaving."

This naturally raised some interesting questions: was this actually a line for service, or were all of us somehow mistaken? It just didn't seem plausible that twenty random strangers would draw the same erroneous conclusion and come to be standing together, like a bunch of idiots, for no good reason. Was it a joke? Were we being Punked? Or maybe it was all a dream? Were we actually dreaming? It didn't seem possible, and yet...

Now I started stalking up and down the Delta service counters, wandering back and forth like a big cat in a cage, searching for a customer service representative who would actually help me, all the while racking my brains: why were these people standing here behind the customer service counter, but not helping anyone? What other business could they possibly be handling? Couldn't they see the growing line of customers about to miss their flights?

I decided to interrupt another one of the counter representatives. "Excuse me, I need to check in for my flight, and I've been waiting for half an hour in that line, which isn't moving, and now it's the 45-minute cutoff, and I'm really worried I won't get on the flight!"

"Did you try checking in at the kiosks?" I explained, again, that I couldn't, and she explained, "I can't help you because I'm taking care of this over here," motioning vaguely to indicate the counter space to her immediate left, where nobody was standing and nothing was happening, adding, "You have to get her to help you" -- gesturing towards a third counter rep to her right, who was in the process of leaving the counter to help a confused old woman. How could this third rep help me if she was leaving, I demanded to know, turning back to the second rep -- only to find she had disappeared too.

There was now no one at all behind the Delta counter, not even the baggage handlers, who had been flirting with some of the counter reps but also disappeared at the exact same moment -- almost as if all the Delta employees were responding to the same secret signal, warning that paying customers were nearby. I had nowhere left to turn but the tragic chorus -- the two dozen or so would-be passengers who were still standing, waiting, angry, confused: "I mean, this is crazy right?"

Chorus: "We have been waiting here half an hour."

"And now it looks like there's no one here at all, right?"

Chorus: "Our flight leaves in half an hour, we're probably going to miss it."

In the end the third counter rep returned, who somehow got me confirmed for my flight even though it was past the 45-minute cutoff. I never found out why I couldn't check in at the kiosk, and I didn't care. With waves of relief washing over me, I still felt a twinge of guilt as I left the other passengers standing in line, still glaring at the line of customer service reps behind the counter, who for their part were still studiously avoiding eye contact. Parting ways with the tragic chorus, I bade them good luck and godspeed, and hurried on to security, never so happy to have a stranger grab my junk.