Airlines should skip the canned responses

Its ‘sincere apologies’ sometimes fall flat

Leslie O’Flahavan looks more like an English teacher than an airline employee. Everything about her is nononsense, from her curly black hair to her Nordstrom business-casual attire to her carefully chosen words.

Maybe that’s because she spent nearly a decade as a high school educator. But she has moved on to a different kind of teaching: tutoring airlines on how to use the right words to respond to passenger comments and complaints.

O’Flahavan is a customer service writing expert who runs a boutique business called E-Write, based in Silver Spring, Md., which helps travel companies recast their letter template libraries into shorter, easier to read and “modern-sounding” emails. Her clients have included Virgin America, Air Canada and several other major domestic carriers.

“The airlines I work with hire me to help make their correspondence more natural and responsive,” she explains. “They already care about better-quality communication with customers, and they want to improve.”

Which phrases are overused by airlines? What’s the best way to approach a carrier with a customer service problem?

“The form responses airlines have used in the past have been horribly robotic and as canned as tuna,” she says. “They cause customers to wonder, ‘Is this just a form letter?’ ”

This is what a template looks like before O’Flahavan works her magic:

“Please accept our sincere apologies for any inconvenience which you experienced. Due to operational disruption, and in an effort to maintain your flight as scheduled, a decision was made to replace the aircraft operating your flight on (date) with the available aircraft which was a smaller aircraft. Unfortunately, this change resulted in a downgrade of the fare class to which you were assigned. Our sincerest apologies.”

And here’s the “after:” “Thank you for writing to us about your flight to (destination) when we were not able to seat you in (class) Class. I’m really sorry this happened. We know our passengers count on traveling in the class in which they have purchased their tickets, and I understand that it was frustrating when this did not happen for you.”

See the difference? Less jargon, less stuffiness. A little more personalization.

I asked O’Flahavan for the phrases airlines should never use:

“We regret any inconvenience

this may have caused.” Three words make this phrase galling: “any” and “may have.” “It’s a passive-aggressive non-apology,” she says. In other words, airlines that use the original phrase aren’t really sorry.

“Safety is our top priority.” “This statement is really an indirect way of suggesting you, the customer, would put your own convenience over the safety of air travelers,” she says.

“We will share your comments with the appropriate team for review.” “This phrase is the quickest way to convince passengers the airline will ignore their feedback,” O’ Flahavan says. “Like most major carriers …” These words are often used to justify customer-unfriendly policies. Examples include high change fees, baggage fees and restrictive ticket policies.

“We appreciate your loyalty to our airline.” No one buys that.

So the next time you write to an airline, pay attention to how it responds. If nothing else, you’ll know how much it really cares about customer service.