‘United (Airlines) Breaks Guitars’ (Doo Dah, Doo Dah …) July 15, 2009
Posted by Charles Bosdet in customer relations, Customer service, Humor, PR disaster, Public relations.Tags: customer relations, Customer service, dave carroll, guitar, PR disaster, sons of maxwell, united airlines
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The American Tourister gorilla is alive and well at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, and he has friends.
Everyone has a tale of customer service gone to hell, but it’s hard to top Canadian musician Dave Carroll’s run-in with United Airlines. That would be the airline that probably thinks it’s in PR hell right now because, well, it is.
Carroll wrote a very catchy country song about the incident, United Breaks Guitars, made a music video for a reported $150 and posted it to YouTube. The song is going viral on YouTube beyond anyone’s dreams or expectations — certainly beyond United’s fondest wish — with about three million views this past week and rising.
And, oh: Rolling Stone’s Rock & Roll Daily blog featured the incident as its lead story July 13. In fact, the story’s all over the place: CBC, CNN, Fox, CBC, CTV …
Dave and Don Carroll. When UAL made toast of Dave's guitar, he went viral.
United Breaks Guitars is a tale of travel, a broken Taylor guitar, yearlong travail and the low-key Nova Scotia songwriter’s shattered hope of finding someone — anyone — at the airline who would give a damn about fixing the guitar that United baggage handlers were tossing like skeet at Chicago O’Hare.
You can read the whole mind-boggling, highly readable story at Dave Carroll’s Web site, www.davecarrollmusic.com, but last Thursday eturbonews summarized the story this way:
The $3,500 Taylor acoustic guitar had been custom-made and was packed in a padded double case, but United refused to take responsibility. Carroll sent emails, wrote letters and talked to people at the airline over nine months until a Chicago employee told him to stop sending emails because he wasn’t going to get compensation.
Friday, The Globe and Mail reported United’s public response after Carroll’s video started going viral:
Robin Urbanski Janikowski, a spokeswoman for United, said on Thursday in an email that Mr. Carroll’s story “has struck a chord with us.”
“We are in conversations with one another to make what happened right,” she said.
“While we mutually agree that this should have been fixed much sooner, Dave Carroll’s excellent video provides United with a unique learning opportunity that we would like to use for training purposes to ensure all customers receive better service from us.”
More than any other, this David vs. Goliath story impressed me with just how much the Web has leveled the playing field for customers done wrong by indifferent corporate bureaucracies, from front-line employees through customer service. Three million YouTube hits in a week says the cost to United Airlines’ customer goodwill and ad budget will far outstrip the $1,200 cost of repairing Carroll’s guitar by many, many orders of magnitude.
Scene from Sons of Maxwell 'Guitar' video.
Meanwhile, Dave Carroll promises he and his brother, Don, who together form the group Sons of Maxwell, will soon release the second of the three songs Dave promised United he would write about his experience. He says it will also be a lighthearted number. He has turned down a belated offer of reimbursement from United, asking the airline to donate the money to charity.
United Breaks Guitars is available as an MP3 download for $.99 through Carroll’s Sons of Maxwell Web site.
United jetliner in PR graveyard.
Advertising Pays June 16, 2009
Posted by Charles Bosdet in advertising, Automobiles, Humor, Revenge.Tags: advertising, Automobiles, customer relations, Land Rover, lemons, Revenge
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Apparently the “laugh and the world laughs with you, cry and you cry alone” school of automobile ownership didn’t appeal to an unhappy Range Rover owner in the United Kingdom.
“Rover’s revenge” headlines the London Daily Mail Online, which says the anonymous owner, more inured to making lemonade of his lemon and sharing it with others, emblazoned the windows of his £50,000 Sport HSE with a laundry list of woes and parked the car in front of the Range Rover dealership in Colchester, Essex.
Large, lemon-yellow vinyl lettering on the body of the car advises:
IF YOU WANT TROUBLE FREE MOTORING DO NOT BUY ONE OF THESE !!!
As moved as the dealership may have been by the display, it reportedly could not move the car because it’s on a public road.
What to do, what to do?
Take a cue from your customer: Make lemonade.
A Jaguar Land Rover spokesman, the Mail reports, noted Rover has “a comprehensive warranty program and a strong goodwill policy,” and that Rover has “made a goodwill offer towards helping [the customer] into a new vehicle.”
One loose end: The Mail does not say whether Rover will load the disgruntled customer into another Rover or someone else’s brand–anyone else’s brand.
