by Kevin Coupe
It doesn’t happen very often that something positive can be said about cellphone companies.
But this morning, I’m going to do it.
Last week, as reports spread about a vast cellphone outage that affected users all over the US – AT&T later said it was a coding problem, not any sort of cyberattack – I said to Mrs. Content Guy, “Y’know, the right thing to do would be for AT&T to offer some sort of small refund to customers. But they’ll never do that.”
To be clear, my iPhone is on AT&T, but I was not affected by the outage, largely, I think, because I spent most of the day in my home office, where I was connected via wifi.
But yesterday, AT&T proved me both right and wrong. I got this email:
“We apologize for Thursday’s network outage. We recognize the frustration this outage has caused and know we let many of our customers down. We understand this may have impacted their ability to connect with family, friends, and others. Small business owners may have been impacted, potentially disrupting an essential way they connect with customers.
“To help make it right, we’re reaching out to potentially impacted customers and we’re proactively applying a credit to their accounts. We want to reassure our customers of our commitment to reliably connect them – anytime and anywhere.
“We’re crediting them for the average cost of a full day of service. We’re also taking steps to prevent this from happening again in the future. Our priority is to continuously improve and be sure our customers stay connected.”
That credit, apparently, is five dollars – not a lot of money, not even enough to buy a venti latte at Starbucks.
But I thought it was the right thing to do, especially because it could cost AT&T millions of dollars. But if you are going to be in the stay-connected business, it is critical to do even the hard things that create or sustain connections with customers.
Let’s be clear. I – and a lot of other folks – will probably find reasons toi curse out AT&t sometime soon. Maybe within days. Or hours.
But in this moment, they did the right, even differentiating thing.
Compare this to last week, as American Airlines, Alaska Air and JetBlue all announced that they were increasing their checked baggage fees. And United Airlines announced that it would do the same thing, rather than make slightly lower fees a flyer-friendly differential advantage. (No word from Delta as of this writing.)
For the record, Fox Business writes that “according to an annual report from IdeaWorks Co. and CarTrawler, the top 20 global airlines made more than $33 billion in revenue from bag fees last year.
“Baggage fees, according to the report, are seen as a ‘significant component of ancillary revenue’ to help carriers offset other costs. In 2023, the $33 billion accounted for about 4.1% of global airline revenue in 2023. It was also an increase of 15% from the $29 billion the companies collected in 2022.”
Flyers are a captive audience, to a great degree. There often aren’t a ton of options. And so we have to simply eat whatever increases the airlines want to shove down our throats.
Except that … according to the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, “Throughout the pandemic, via three separate statutes, the 10 major US passenger airlines together received more than $54 billion in direct payments ($25 billion, $15 billion, and $14 billion). Congress also appropriated another $25 billion in subsidized loans from the US Department of the Treasury (only a fraction of which airlines have used) and suspended the 7.5 percent excise tax on domestic air travel as well as payments to airports and contractors.”
In other words, the airlines were perfectly willing to feed at the public trough.
Maybe, just maybe, the airlines should consider the fact that their customers also are taxpayers, and that their tax dollars essentially were used to keep them afloat in tough times.
How cool would it have been if last week, United Airlines had released a statement that went something like this:
It has come to our attention that some of our competitors are raising their checked baggage fees. But we’re not. Because we remember that one of the reasons we survived the pandemic is because we were helped by the federal government, and that the federal government is funded by the taxpayers – in other words, by our customers. So we’re drawing the line. Not because we have to. But because it is the right thing do. Because as we fly into the future, it is important that we all be united.
It could’ve been an Eye-Opening moment. Maybe not one that would have bolstered the bottom line in this quarter, but one that might have fostered sustained customer relationships that would have benefitted the company in the long term.
The post Monday Eye-Opener: Reaching Out, Touching Someone appeared first on MNB.
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