This is a good example of just one emerging technology that should strike fear in the hearts of companies that aren’t doing a very good job meeting their customers’ needs: live streaming mobile video.
A couple of weeks ago, I was flying out of Stewart Airport in upstate New York. Our flight was delayed due to inclement weather, which was absolutely out of the control of the airline, Skybus. What was in Skybus’s control was the handling of the delay. They did a lamentable job, as detailed by the video I filmed at the airport with my mobile phone.
It’s a simple principle of communicating with customers: Tell them what you know, when you know it. By not doing this, Skybus failed to manage expectations and made several customers swear never to use their airline again.
What I found most interesting was how the woman in charge on the ground for Skybus, who is visible in the background of my video, reacted when she saw and heard me making it. No sooner had I stopped filming than she reached for her microphone and made an announcement – the first of the evening, well after our plane should have departed – about the delay. After that, she was profuse in her apologies and repeated to me several times that Skybus was wrong not to have kept passengers informed. It was good of her to acknowledge this, but not such a big help to the customers who had to scramble to make alternative pick-up, driving, and hotel arrangements because Skybus failed to let them know there was a delay. (In the end, our flight landed three hours late, and some people were unable to book hotel rooms on such short notice. Luckily, I was only a $60 cab ride from a friend’s house.)
I did not tell her that the video I’d made had streamed live to the internet as I was filming it, and that her apologies would not lead me to take it offline. The technology is a relatively new one, not in the hands of many people just yet, but in 18 months or fewer…Watch out. The balance of power to customers may have not shifted completely, but technologies like this – and the networks of people who use and propogate them – are chipping away, whether businesses like Skybus realize it or not.
Filed under: Customer Power
