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Don’t Let Viral Marketing Give Your Business a Fatal Illness
March 4, 2008

Two blog posts (one, admittedly, by me) detail travel horror stories. A cursory search around the Web will turn up many such stories of being stranded by airlines. (I did one quick Google search for “[Name of airline withheld] horror stories” and got about 240,000 hits. Even if the first two pages—the only ones I looked through—are accurate hits, that’s still a lot for any single company.) Go to Travelocity, Expedia, or other travel sites, and hotel experiences are cited by travelers. User and buyer comments at e-commerce sites like Amazon are increasingly the top ways that consumers form opinions of companies and products. This all falls under the general category of word of mouth marketing and, in some cases, “viral” marketing.

According to data cited by eMarketer:

More and more, consumers are relying on advice from friends, family and even strangers to make purchase decisions, select physicians, choose travel destinations and pick politicians to vote for. Already, 64 million US adults regularly share advice on products or services, and over 25 million of them wield their influence online.

And in December 2007, BIGresearch (via eMarketer) studied which media influence purchases of specific product types, and they found that word of mouth, cited by 42% of respondents, was the number one influence of electronics purchases.

If you’ve ever seen the great classic British sitcom Fawlty Towers, you may remember the episode where hostile hotelier Basil Fawlty (John Cleese) hears a rumor that a hotel inspector is staying in the hotel and he spends half the episode fawning over several guests whom he thinks are the inspector, only to discover that they sell spoons and outboard motors, respectively, the real inspector not having actually arrived yet. The point that can be gleaned from the episode is that if he had done a better job of treating all the guests like valued customers, he wouldn’t have had to go out of his way to kiss up to one particular potential influencer. (Of course, if he had, Fawlty Towers wouldn’t have been a very funny show!)

I wrote in my own blog post about a recent nightmare experience with a certain airline that I was specifically writing the post not to complain (well, not entirely), but to highlight the fact that in this age of word of mouth marketing, blogging, and user comments and forums, companies have no idea whom they are dealing with anymore, since everyone is a critic. As a result, it behooves companies to pay closer attention to their customer service efforts, since a bad experience has a very good chance of making its way online. And chalk it up to human nature, but it’s sad but true that bad experiences are more likely to be imparted than good ones.

My own blog post reads, in part:

[While flying on the first leg of my trip], the captain came over the loudspeaker and said, “It looks like we will be 10 minutes early.” This made me happy, as I was starting to sweat my connection. If I missed it, I would be stuck, as there wasn’t another flight until the next day (Saturday)....My connection was scheduled to leave at 9:55. Happily, we landed...at 9:10.

One more time for the world: we landed at 9:10.

Then we sat; the captain said that they were waiting for a gate to open up, and it would be another 10 or 15 minutes. Gulp! At about 9:30, the captain came on again and said that the plane that was supposed to leave our gate had maintenance problems and had to pull back to the gate, so we would have to wait for another unspecified period of time. I then asked the flight attendant whether or not I was likely to make my 9:55 connection. ...What she said...was “They know you’re here. They’ll hold the plane. Don’t worry.” Ah. Other people had similar concerns so she went and told the captain, who came over the loudspeaker with the same smug tone and said, “Those of you who have connecting flights, don’t worry. They know you’re here and will hold them.” And then he literally said (I am not making this up), “My nose is growing as I’m saying this.” Great.

We finally got to a gate at 10:00. I dashed off the plane and ran through the airport (naturally, I have to run from Terminal B to Terminal D)....

I arrived at the gate at 10:05 and was told that [my connection] had left. I instinctively unleashed a torrent of profanity, but apologized. They smirked at me and said that there was a service desk several gates over that could help me rebook. No “sorry” or “we apologize” or anything. Just the implication that it was my fault that I missed the flight. So I went to the service desk and it was obvious from the outset that the people behind it could not care less. There was, they said, no other flight...until Saturday afternoon (this would turn out to be not entirely true). And that’s that. By this time, other refugees from my flight (and another one) appeared and we were told to go to Gate D5 where a supervisor would take care of us. We did so; there were about five of us. 10, 15 minutes went by and no one showed up. A few unlucky airline employees wandered by who knew nothing about our problem and were not in a position to help us (imagine my surprise)....At that point...an airline employee, showed up. He was not really a supervisor..., but he took pity on us and looked to see what he could do, and started tapping away at a computer, which inexplicably started spitting out several dozen meal vouchers for a cancelled London flight. As he was trying to help us, a supervisor...wandered over, sussed out what was happening, and called [the helpful employee] away to an adjacent gate. From what some of were able to discern, he started chewing [him] out for helping us. WTF?! This was the last we saw of [him]. It was at this point that things started to become increasingly surreal.

The “official” supervisor who we were told would be assisting us never arrived, and we stood there fairly clueless for a while. Compounding matters was that we discovered that there was some kind of basketball tournament in town and there were no hotel rooms available....By this time, it was about 11:00 and the airport was closing down for the night, as there were no more flights out until morning.

One employee passed through....She was exceedingly nice, listened to our tale of woe, and took us back to the service desk (which the previous occupants had abandoned pretty quickly) and proceeded to rebook us. (It’s funny how airline computers always take forever to do anything. Why oh why does my cellphone have a more powerful processor than an airline’s reservation system?) [She] was very helpful and gave us a ton of $10 meal vouchers (which could be redeemed at any restaurant or concession stand in the airport). She tried to get us hotels at the airline’s expense, but also discovered that there were none to be had. And, as it also turned out, nothing in the airport is open after 11:00, so there were no restaurants or, more importantly, bars at which to hang out and relax. So it looked like we would be sleeping in the airport.

The story goes on, but the takeaway is this. Worse than missing my connection or having to sleep in an airport was the complete disinterest shown by the airline’s customer service personnel. The only ones who were helpful had stumbled across us by accident—and one guy was even reprimanded for it. In this age of blogging and word-of-mouth marketing, companies can’t control their images the way they used to, when phalanxes of PR agents could spin away adversity. This is no more. Sure, having been in statistical analysis for almost a decade, I know that anecdotal evidence is not statistically projectable, and isolated incidents do not a trend make. But which are potential travelers—and customers—likely to pay more attention to: a research report that finds that X% of customers are happy with a particular company’s performance, or one or two highly dramatic horror stories?

Customers increasingly use online comments, Web searches, and other word of mouth evidence form their opinions of companies and decide which to patronize and which to steer clear of. Companies have little choice these days but to actually try to provide decent customer service. The point of a free enterprise system is, after all, choice; each airline even says this at the end of a flight: “We know you have a choice in airlines, and we thank you for flying [insert name here].” Consumers make better choices when they have all the facts, and if there is one thing that the Internet can give them is all the facts.

Adversity is a constant; things can always go wrong, and I think most people accept that (although there are always exceptionally difficult people no matter what the situation). But how companies handle adversity is the best judge of that company’s commitment to its customers.

Ultimately, as businesspeople, we should be cognizant of the reputations we get among potential customers. Many businesses do, and I applaud them. Any company that takes the effort to send out a follow-up customer satisfaction survey will likely get my business again. True, I have no idea if anyone does anything with the data that are obtained, and if I were more cynical than I am, I would be inclined to think the survey was just a PR stunt, but I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

It’s probably not surprising, then, that I have received no customer satisfaction survey following my trip. Basil Fawlty remains in business.

Posted by Richard Romano on March 4, 2008 | Comments (0)