Do You Treat Your Customers Like Human Beings?

I recently had the experience of being treated like cattle. First, I was told that everything would be fine…but the services I paid for would be about 9 hours late. I wasn’t offered money off or any other compensation. I wasn’t offered a meal or a comfortable place to wait for my services. I was not allowed to leave the office of the service giver.In fact, as I wandered down the hall, I found hundreds of others like me who had received the same late notice. They slept on cots with small thin blankets in a brightly lit, freezing hallway. I grabbed a blanket from the pile and found a cot myself. The hallway had vehicles moving through it, beeping.

Employees of the service giver yelled to each other, as if they were unaware that hundreds of people were trying to sleep off the wait. At 4:00 a.m., one of the employees yelled, “It’s 4:00 a.m. Time to get up. We have to put the cots and blankets away”. And like sheep, the 200 slowly emerged, bleary eyed, to find out if the services they’d been waiting for would now be available.

Kafka? No. A major U.S. airport. The message? If you are one of our customers, you are nothing to us. We may or may not serve you. And we may or may not treat you like human beings. As someone who works at an Indianapolis business marketing agency, I was dumbstruck. How could an airline or an airport conceive that treating its customers (who pay their salaries) as chattel could be acceptable? I vowed never to fly through this airport or use this airline again if I could possibly avoid them. But does the entire airline industry think that this is acceptable day to day behavior? This is an extreme example. But let it be a lesson to all of us who operationalize brand positioning strategy or strategic marketing planning that customers deserve respect – and that a brand that forgets those it serves will not survive in the end.