Finding compassion in the Budget
Costs of service can be worth it
The basics of good customer service, like courtesy and attentiveness, may be free. But great service? That’s expensive.
Consider what happened to Virginia Bibliowicz’s father, who rented a car from Budget recently. Shortly after he picked up the vehicle in Knoxville, Tenn., he suffered a heart attack and died.
“When my sister and her husband returned the car later, Budget refused to let them pay the charges,” she says. “I think Budget and this rep should be commended, and they will certainly always have our business.”
The car rental company didn’t accept a penny of the family’s money because it was the right thing to do, just as airlines offer no-questions-asked refunds when passengers die before their flight. These decisions make perfect sense to customers, but not always to a revenue-obsessed travel industry.
The late rental cost Budget hundreds of dollars, and my efforts to find the employee who zeroed out the bill were unsuccessful. It isn’t clear if the agent who waived the fee was rewarded or punished. Many airline employees, for example, are strictly forbidden from offering passengers waivers and favors, even as their bosses boast about employee “empowerment.” The sad fact is, most customer service agents probably couldn’t push a button and make your change fee disappear even if they wanted to.
“The distance an employee will go in perfecting a service recovery is directly a result of the management culture at the company,” says Jim Coyle, who runs the hospitality market research firm Coyle Hospitality Group. “An assistant manager sweating a budget can kill a good service culture by chastising an employee who went a little too far in helping a customer.”
Can’t you offer great service and earn a respectable profit? Maybe if you’re a boutique hotel company such as the Library Hotel Collection, which essentially gives its employees carte blanche to address customer concerns. Henry Kallan, who owns the Library Hotel Collection, cautions that saying no makes only short-term sense in the hospitality business. But it’s a long-term recipe for disaster. “With a decision made purely on a financial basis, you may make money today and leave the guest unhappy, but it is far more profitable in the long run to cultivate life-long customers.”
At other hotels, employees are rewarded for breaking the rules, as long as it results in a better service experience. At boutique luxury chain Kimpton, going above and beyond for a guest is referred to as a “Kimpton moment.”
“The rule is: There isn’t a rule,” says Tom Waithe, Kimpton’s regional director of operations for the Pacific Northwest. “Use your best judgment and try and make the situation better for the guest.”
Maybe it’s a little easier to pull a “no rules” policy in the hotel business than, say, in the airline industry, where junk fees seem to have no limits, and airlines rely on these nuisance surcharges so much that failing to collect even a single $200 change fee is said to have a meaningful effect on a flight’s profitability.
So it was with considerable interest that I read that among American Airlines’ post-merger goals was “empowering people with greater decision-making authority.” Here’s an airline that, combined with US Airways, sucked an eye-popping $815 million in ticket-change fees out of our wallets in 2012, the most of any domestic airline. It’s hard to imagine how flexible employees of the “new” American could be, given their dependence on these fees.
Unfortunately, talk of employee empowerment is often exactly that — talk. Jon Picoult, founder of the customer experience advisory firm Watermark Consulting, calls this “slogan leadership” and says it hurts customers as much as it does employees. “It encourages the employee to feel empowered and make decisions, only to be reprimanded by the same manager when they make what’s viewed as a poor judgment call in the course of delivering service.”
So the next time an employee zeroes out your bill or waives a fee, don’t just say “thank you.” Say “thank you very much,” because that person may find himself in a manager’s office, and in extreme cases, out of work.
Bibliowicz is very grateful to Budget. Her father, Reid Patterson, was a 1956 Olympic swimmer who lived a quiet life as a financial adviser and swimming coach. She says his family will remember him for “always doing the right thing, quietly.”