Be Here Now Marketing: How United Airlines Can Take Advantage of Flight Delays

Everyone knows the airlines are hurting. What I don't understand is why they seem unable to learn from the recurring problems they experience to be both more efficient and to actually convert them into marketing moments. Here's a real life example with several free ideas I have for United Airlines, or any airline really.

The Case of the Cancelled Flight

Shane and I were booked to travel from DTW to ORD to LAX to HNL on Sunday, June 29th. Shortly after we landed in Chicago from our first leg (a brief one hour flight) I got an auto alert on my phone saying the next leg was cancelled. I immediately got on the phone to start the re-booking process. Although it was just noon in Chicago, they told me there were no more seats available to either or LAX (Los Angeles) or SFO (San Francisco) both of which have flights to HNL.

Let's stipulate these generic facts:

• ORD is United's largest hub.
• There is one Customer Service counter in the entire Concourse B, with 22 gates.
• Going west we gain time; that means more wiggle room for getting home.
• United has flights to LAX and SFO about every 2 hours.
• It's a 4.5 hour scheduled flight from ORD to LAX/SFO.
• There are flights leaving LAX/SFO for HNL as late as 11 p.m. Chicago time.
• I am a Premier flyer with UA, a designation earned by flying 25,000 miles or more each year.
• UA databases already track me, my miles, my status, etc so that I can have priority seating, etc.
• There are several self-service kiosks adjacent to the human-staffed Customer Service stations.

So how is it possible there was not another plane to be put in service, at their largest hub? How over-booked are the airlines to not have a few extra seats across several flights to two different destinations? We could not even get to LAX or SFO, much less on to HNL. How much does it cost the airline to have to rebook and provide meals and lodging in the event of a cancellation? Consider direct costs as well as labor costs for all the face-to-face interactions that were required to handle each of the interrupted travelers.

Now let me stipulate these case-specific facts:

• Although we were able to re-book via phone (albeit via India) we still had to stand in line to get a hotel voucher and find out the status of our luggage.
• Shane stood in line for 2 HOURS and 33 MINUTES at the lone Customer Service counter.
• The counter was staffed with one or two agents, and at one point, all agents left and there was no one behind the counter (see photo above). The vacancy lasted about 5 minutes.
• UA was willing to rebook us on American Airlines, for a flight at 8 p.m. into LAX. We would have to overnight there. They were not willing to give us a pass to the Red Carpet Club so we could get some work done for the 6 hour wait.
• I spent $50 of my own money to buy drinks for people in line, some of whom waited even longer than two and a half hours.
• No one was using the kiosks; they were told they must see a Customer Service agent to get boarding passes and vouchers.

How United Could Make Friends Instead of Enemies During a Flight Cancellation

1. Attend to your most loyal customers immediately and differently.
   • Send automated phone alerts to Premier customers with the following offer:
     • Please come to the Red Carpet Club on a free day pass where we will give you priority re-booking and refreshments and you can wait out the delay in a quiet setting suitable to working and resting.
     • If you like, you can join the Red Carpet Club today for a one-time savings of 20%. If you are already a member, we will provide you with XX credit to your renewal fees (or XX miles to use as you please.)
     • We apologize for the inconvenience you are experiencing and hope these measures will minimize the difficulties to you.
2. Utilize existing resources more efficiently and even create selling opportunities.
   • Red Carpet Club staff normally are not very busy; let them handle your most loyal customers. This will also relieve some of the burden on the public Customer Service counter.
   • It can create an up-sell opportunity out of a crisis.
   • I asked three different agents for a pass and they all responded with, "Oh no, we can't do that, no, no" as if I had asked for a private charter to get to my destination.
3. Use the staff and data you have remotely, more efficiently.
   • Allow the staff who is doing the re-booking to also issue food and lodging vouchers.
   • Allow customers to print new boarding passes and vouchers from the self-service kiosks.
   • Allow the customer to choose from a list of pre-approved hotels, when applicable.
   • Create a marketing agreement with someone like Target or P&G to have emergency comfort kits on hand. With a voucher printed from the kiosk, a customer could pick up a kit that includes a toothbrush, personal hygiene samples, and a few coupons for later use.
   • This would dramatically speed up the process of getting customers on their way and make them feel understood and appreciated for the predicament they are in.
4. Provide for basic human needs because it's a safety issue too.
   • If a long line situation is necessary in the short term, then have someone handing out water or simple refreshments. The terminal at O'Hare has wonderful light-filled skylights. It was also very hot and stuffy and I can easily see a situation of dehydration causing a more serious problem, especially for an older passenger.
   • I took it on myself to go buy 20 bottles of cold water and soda to hand out - you would have thought I was Mother Teresa! Thinking ahead to people's basic human needs can help people connect with you positively.
   • My father, 84, said to me, "I can't imagine what I would have done. I wouldn't be able to stand in line that long. What would have happened?" In his case, he would have simply paid whatever it took to get out of the situation, and, he would be on the phone next day raising holy hell with the airline's executives and his own travel department. One influential traveler can direct an entire company to stop using your airline.
5. Higher Tech Options
   • Develop hand-held computers (like Apple and Hertz use) to print out vouchers so a mobile agent could be in line processing the simpler cases.
   • Assign passengers to groups, and ask them to return in staged, 15-minute increments. Give them a number or card for their group. This would allow them to rest in a nearby gate or eat or use bathroom facilities the majority of their time.
   • What about using those vibrating hand-held devices many crowded restaurants use? Again, it lets people use their wait time productively instead of being tortured to stand on their feet in a long hot line.

Bottom Line - There is Opportunity Here

Chicago is United's major hub. What a great place to have products and systems in place for the inevitable cancellations and delays. These are regular occurrences that seem to throw the airlines into crisis every time they happen. They could be marketing moments and irritations instead.

I asked one agent, wasn't there one other plane, given the hub status, to put into service? She responded that it was the end of the month and they were running out of personnel hours. The inadequately-staffed Customer Service counter reflected this also. Dear companies, at some point you've got to stop cutting back on people.

Overbooking and and capacity cuts are also max'd out. You would think the many flights a day from ORD to LAX/SFO could absorb one cancelled flight's worth of passengers, but that was not true on Sunday.

The airlines plan for the big things, but the little things that truly affect millions and define their impressions of your brand and over-burden your personnel? Largely ignored.

Little things can make a big difference and would actually save money I believe. Some one-time programming upgrades would allow existing kiosks to handle passengers. Having some comfort kits could help your branding and might actually be free - I can imagine companies wanting to have that type of access to travelers to introduce their products. Providing water or a few chairs? That's basic humanity.

Of course these are just one person's ideas, born from "being here now" (with a wink to @PatrickByers). To gather more ideas, instead of having a formal survey that doesn't really allow the customer to describe her experience, how about setting up a customer service forum? Many will not be easy to implement, but what are the real costs of delays and the incumbent stress and out of pocket compensations?

As a loyal United customer, I want to see them succeed! I regularly pay an extra $100-200 to get my preferred seating and extra leg room. There are many of us who are actually on your side, but please, we don't want to be tested any more than this.

On the other hand, what if in a year we could start reading blog posts like United Takes the Pain out of Flight Delays or Get Stuck Here if You Have to Get Stuck. Air travel has turned into an equally miserable experience for both passengers and airline staff. Let's turn this airship around and take advantage of both the hub structure and the data mining that are readily available to the airlines so we can help ourselves more and stop having the heinous history repeat itself.

Are comments moderated on HillaryClinton.com?

Apparently the answer is "YES."

I heard a speech from her last night asking people to come to her web site and share our thoughts. I did just that on this post, in a very clean and respectful way. My message was asking her to gracefully concede, acknowledging that she fought a good race but nonetheless has lost, albeit by a very small margin. I even twittered it, so others could share their feedback. (This was 12 hours ago.)

My comment is not available in the over 1100 comments, and if you read thru them, there IS NOT A SINGLE NEGATIVE COMMENT. How can this be?

HillaryClinton.com is new media at its worst. Giving people a chance to register and comment, and then doing massive and one-sided filtering of comments to convey a massively inaccurate record of the facts.

Hillary was a candidate for the last century. Yes, a lot of people are more comfortable back there, but the times, they are a changin'. For the better, in my opinion, despite all the messiness of the change.

Moderating comments (e.g. for profanity) is standard practice on some websites, like the Huffington Post. But they show you the number of total comments and the the number in the moderation queue. They even proved an easy-to-find FAQ on their comment policy.

Don’t Get It? Don’t Worry!

I came across this article in AdWeek on Coca-Cola Hunts for Social-Net Formula: The company's online marketing highs and lows show an old brand learning new tricks. On the one hand, they have spent millions and millions trying to "get" a new media/social strategy that feels like a win. OTOH, they haven't hit the proverbial home run yet, and to their credit, are still in the game playing.

The schizophrenic responses show the uncertain embrace Coke's made of social media as it tries to translate its over 50 years of success in the traditional marketing world to the new terrain. The pitfalls the company has faced and concessions it's made highlight the challenges faced by big brands navigating the new marketing playbook.

What is driving this post from me is that me and my colleagues bemoan daily on Twitter and other social sites about how many companies "don't get it." But you know what? It's not easy getting it, if you haven't been raised on the internet, like we have.

So let's stipulate these facts into the record:

1. It is really hard to get it, especially the bigger you are. You are too shielded from people who will tell you the truth and who will take risks and who actually have any experience down here on the streets of the web where all of the market disruption and social media creation is taking place.
2. There is a level of chance and unpredictability involved. Going "viral" is not something you can plan for and purchase off the shelf. A viral response online is just like it is in biology - an unexpected mutation that takes off in an entirely new direction.
3. If you have any hope of having a concept go viral however, you FIRST have to get out there and make media, have conversations, and take risks. It ain't gonna happen in the safety of a board room with your usual suspects. If you don't know who they are, email me and I will explain it to you in private.
4. IMO, any company serious about developing a social campaign should have BOTH the stable of brand agency players as well as a young upstart new media expert firm in the planning and execution. I've written previously about errors made by such luminaries as Walmart and Ford who spent a lot of money on big agency misfires. Remember, big agencies have the "big" problem too. See #1 above. You want a tour guide who speaks the language natively, not someone who just bought the Cliff Notes, on your team.
5. Please have a tolerance for messiness. People raised online cannot be controlled, and you will only lose more, faster, by trying to do so.
6. Try and get over your addiction to big numbers. They were mostly meaningless in terms of actual response rates.
7. Relax. The internet is not going away. You have time to experiment, to see what works for you and the nuances of your corporate culture. The marketplace on the one hand is very harsh on people who try to game the system, but incredibly forgiving of those who are willing to have a meaningful, valuable exchange of ideas, products, and services.

Gaurav Mishra is writing a book-as-blog experiment and recently discussed Patricia Martin, author of Ren Gen. There are numerous good points but I want to leave you with this one as you think about how "to get it":

People Want Authenticity: A related trend is that we want real and authentic experiences, instead of packaged formualic one. So, when we travel, we are not satisfied with the usual photo-opportunities; instead, we want to participate in adventure sports, or immerse ourselves in local culture, or go off the beaten track and explore nature.

Just remember, you can't buy authenticity. You earn it, one transparent conversation at a time. That's nothing to worry about, just something to start practicing. Maybe even in a staff meeting today!

Dave Evans on Twitter & the Metrics Panel at SXSW

I am posting a short video below that I took over dinner at Truluck's in Austin with Dave Evans' version of the Metrics Panel at SXSW. Apparently, the panel members were taking a little too long to get to the point for many audience members, who were communicating via Twitter. Read some actual quotes from the back channel audience conversations.

It's graphic evidence of how fast and dramatically the balance of power is being re-weighted in favor of the recipients of information as compared to the disseminators. Heck, we are all busy; it's not hard to understand the "just get to the facts" attitude that is prevalent at least at tech conferences.

Audiences are Messy Too

Yesterday I wrote about customers being messy, and that it is our job to work with, rather than expect them to use our products and services only as the engineers intended.

Well, audiences can be the same! The Sarah Lacy keynote interview of Mark Zuckerberg yesterday was a very educational event. As a public speaker with 20 years experience, I shared the audience's impatience with her style and also felt her pain as the session eventually erupted in loud shouting protest. A lot of blame is being dispensed, and I think SXSW has some responsibility on the table too. Seems that people who weren't there are being more forgiving however the energy in the room was very hard to dispute.

For me, it's a great opportunity to take some notes to serve as reminders for events in the future. Jeff Jarvis has some examples. I've condensed the collective ideas into a pocket-handy bullet list.

1. The larger the audience, the more it makes sense to plan for contingencies. Once you are in process, the titanic effect kicks in and it is not easy to know if things are going south, and then be able to act on it.
2. Know when to use the old rules and the new rules.
3. Use the best practices of Speaking 1.0:
   • Have a more formal introduction so the audience are informed about the speaker's expertise.
   • Event organizer should prep the speakers and remind them to repeat questions from audience if not captured by the microphone, for the recording and more importantly to keep all in the audience part of the conversation.
   • Have chairs that are comfortable and complementary to the speakers. Do everything you can to help them be at ease and look good so their knowledge can shine through. The chairs were too low to the floor at this keynote, which may have contributed to Sarah Lacy's body language problems and also made it harder to see them on stage.
   • The interviewer's job is to shine a light on the featured guest. It is not to draw attention to oneself.
   • The specific venue will dictate how much of your flashlight has the inquisitive and honoring bulb (the Lannan interviews are superb when people come to hear insights from someone they love) or the probing and investigative bulb (as the Columbia University event with Iran's President Ahmadinejad).
   • If there are pre-arranged questions, and you have been honored with a scoop, don't blow it! (Sarah announced that Facebook was launching a French version and stole the thunder away from Mark Zuckerberg.)
   • Interviewer's job is to ask questions, not make statements. The guest's job is to answer questions, not repeat PR taglines (paragraph 6).
4. Use the best practices of Speaking 2.0:
   • Engage your audience in advance to find out what they want to know from this person who is so private and inaccessible.
   • Being casual does not equal being flip or disrespectful. I thought the comment about his dripping wet t-shirt (from nervousness on a previous interview) was out of place.
   • Bring the audience in to your past experiences with the guest, don't use them to exclude people. This translated as unpleasantly coy, superior, and lacking the highly valued transparency of 2.0.
   • Listen to your customers. When things are not going well, own up to it (don't blame the audience) and take a minute to re-adjust. Ask for help. Apologize. There are numerous 2.0 behaviors that can have haters turn into fan boys if you know about and are willing to use them. I'm not saying this is easy because it isn't. But opportunity exists to help us all become stronger, clearer, and more competent.

Things happen and Sarah, to her credit, is holding up against the barrage of criticism Here's her point of view. Learn, laugh, and move on.

Twitter Joins Us on Verio

Let me start by saying, I'm dropping in on a conversation taking place at Techcrunch, Twitter and on the Joyent blog regarding the continue server outages at Twitter. I use Twitter but have been too busy this past week to even notice their recent round of outages. I found out today they had been hosting with Joyent and last night made the switch to Verio.

We've been a Verio reseller for over 10 years and all our client websites, and our personal sites, are hosted at Verio. A few years back we put some personal sites on a couple servers at TextDrive and everything was fine for a while. Then TextDrive was acquired by Joyent and we started having more and more downtime. It wasn't too much of a problem as these were just personal blogs. But when Beach Walks started taking off, which we initially hosted at TextDrive, we could no longer accept the outages and moved everything off the Joyent servers and terminated all our accounts.

It's a PITA (pain in the ass) managing servers. I've been doing it for 12 years now. We started way back in 1996 hosting all our own servers in our little office in Santa Fe, New Mexico. When the count of servers grew to 10, and I started sleeping in the office to make sure they stayed online, I knew it was time to look for a datacenter.

I did a lot of research over a three month period, looked at all the big datacenters, some of which are no longer around, and finally decided on Verio. Verio is more expensive and very stingy on hard drive space. But the support it top notch, their bandwidth reliable, and most important, in the past 12 years our sites have never been down for more than an hour in the worst cases. Usually if there is an outage the servers are back up before we even knew about the problem.

Obviously we don't require the resources that Twitter does. And there's a lot of technical discussions and general agreement that Ruby On Rails (RoR), on which Twitter is built, has a very difficult time scaling for applications the size of Twitter. I tend to agree and would love to see Twitter re-tooled on a more stable platform such as PHP. But application server preferences aside, the first thing any company should do is not skimp on their hosting provider. You definitely get what you pay for when it comes to hosting in my experience.

So, we wanted to take this opportunity to welcome Twitter to the Verio family. I'm still not convinced RoR is the platform on which to build a heavily trafficked service such as Twitter. But it is definitely going to help now that Twitter is housed in a world class data center such as Verio.

Peas in a Virtual Pod

I can get cranky easily about all of the social networks I am invited to these days. If you were a fly on my office wall, you'd definitely be hearing the unanswered threat, "If I have to fill out one more profile and find any more friends to invite, I'm gonna..." Fortunately there is increasing discussion on being able to manage one's identity online and reducing social network fatigue across multiple locations.

But meanwhile, there is Twitter.

The place with the most inane underlying concept that can suck enormous time and energy time while becoming a major communication tool has created the most valuable new contacts and conversations in my world.

Do you remember when you realized that you can more comfortably say things in an email than you would typically say in person? Well, boil that down to 140 characters (including spaces) and it is amazing what we can communicate to each other. People are emboldened to open their hearts and their rolodexes knowing there is system-imposed limit. I often find that limits can be incredibly liberating within their confines.

My role model this month is Susan Reynolds, an amazing ageless woman who is a geek goddess, lives in Second Life part of her days, and now is literally twittering her way through a breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. She manages to share her experience and receive our abundant love, all in little snippets of text and now the burgeoning growth of avatar pics featuring green peas as our sign of support.

She came home from the biopsy and described her use of frozen peas in the bra to heal faster.

So regardless of the time zone, of the age, of the gender, of the political affiliation, hundreds of us peas are realizing we are all in this pod together. Some are just getting boiled sooner and hotter than others. And we couldn't have a more creative and loving unleader than Susan Reynolds. Follow her on Twitter to get your own morsels of peace.

The downside of being popular

For those of you in a hurry (and there are many!) the answer is: blog gets ignored.

For those of you interested in nuance, here's more:

1. Months ago we started planing a web site re-design. That's one of our core businesses, so it should be easy right? Wrong. We know too much. We ask ourselves too many questions. We consider all kinds of things that would not even be on the radar for many - especially, "What software should we use?" We love software; we get in there and push it hard to see what it can do for us and for our clients. At the end of the day, our wish list is huge and there isn't any one app that does it all for us. For now. So this is worthy of many delays.
2. I hope it's obvious, but if you can't settle on the bones, you can't work on the skin. We did finally settle on WordPress - another post to go over why - and therein lies the next seduction.
3. There are thousands of themes that have been created for WP! That's a lot to look through. And the bummer is that each one is coded by an individual who may or may not have a clear sense of coding the durn thing. Just when we found a concept we likes, we would get in there to do a little customization, and things would fall apart. Those of you who have worked with WP themes are now smiling.
4. Then there is the site transfer. In theory, one database (our old web site) can talk to another database (our new website). In reality, db's are fussy. They want apples to be apples and oranges to be bananas. They don't know what to do when you toss a lilikoi into the mix. So, that takes time holding everybody's hand to move the content over to its new home.
5. Server management. Our old site has been on its old server for over 8 years. Think about your house - you are moving, and you have collected 8 years of stuff. Only when it;s the web, if you don't move everything or update its info, then you inadvertently have all sorts of links out on the internet that break. Uggh.
6. Optimism maybe doesn't help. Every weekend for the past three months, we've thought: this weekend we will just knuckle down and get it finished. We already had 2 sites up (one hidden, waiting for its debut.) I didn't want to start another blog post, and have to enter it in two places! So my apologies to my good friend Chris Brogan, who also inadvertently got stuck as the topic of our most recent post! Chris - hope you got some good link love from that!
7. Popularity. Yes, this is the bottom line. If we hadn't been so popular, with people contacting us to do all sorts of fun things for them, we would have had plenty of time to get the new site up. Fortunately, people love us regardless, and for that I am a happy person today. Is Twitter a measurable distraction? Most days no - much more of an inspiration for me.

So it is with very little fanfare that we present the new old (or old new) site version. We've downsized, simplified, and I am SO ready to get back to regular blogging.

[update march 2008 - this post refers to yet another expired version of our site. We just keep updating it! As new things come along. When did you last update your site?]