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How often have you had this experience: you have some issue with your phone or cable service that necessitates a phone call, and when you finally get a company representative on the line, almost before you can finish explaining the problem, the representative says something like “I’m sorry you are experiencing an outage, Mr. ____, I know how frustrating it can be to experience a problem with your service. I’d just like to take this time to reassure you that I will indeed do everything I can to help you fix this problem. Now, can I verify your desert island discs and mother’s maiden name?”
I suppose it’d be a nice sentiment if we hadn’t all heard the same one verbatim a thousand times before, and it wasn’t being read back to us with all the vocal inflection of a hostage reading a kidnapper’s manifesto. It’s meant to express empathy but does the opposite, sounding rote and automated, like a robot trying to learn to feel. It used to be I’d only hear spiels like this with massive, known-evil entities like Comcast or AT&T, but the phenomenon seems to be spreading. More and more it seems like this is just the way we train all employees — don’t think, just follow the script.
Just imagine the thought process that must’ve gone into creating such a script. Clearly, these companies were getting so many irate phone calls from their customers that they had to try to implement something to fix it. Tellingly, their solution wasn’t to hire more competent employees or, God forbid, improve their actual product. Instead, they almost certainly spent the money on some expensive management consultant, whose solution was simply to write them a new script. “I see the problem, you forgot to install the empathy chip! Here, let me just seat dongle A17 in rack slot GX-23… There. Now the customer anger should be neutralized.”
It’s this process of incremental dehumanization through adherence to process. We’ve been gradually conditioned to treat lower-level employees as disposable cogs and to expect less and less from them. It’s much easier (and more scalable!) to just tweak a script everyone follows rather than, you know, hire kinder, smarter people with common sense and give them the power to solve problems as they arise. Dr. David Dao getting dragged off of a United flight this week seems like a natural culmination of this kind of thinking, a complete breakdown in humanity seemingly caused by an inability to deviate from protocol.
United had overbooked the flight, (which is common practice to keep from throwing away money on empty seats, since flights generally have a few cancellations), but needed to get four employees from Chicago to Louisville. They offered $400 vouchers for travelers willing to take a later flight, also common practice. They received no takers, but inexplicably let the passengers board anyway. While the passengers were seated for takeoff, they continued upping the voucher amounts, to $800, then to $1,000. Still no takers. By the way, you know airports have become barely tolerable when people would turn down a thousand dollars rather than spend a few more hours there. Anyway, at that point, the airline started choosing people at random (it still won’t say exactly how, but here are some hints). Three of those chosen left begrudgingly and one, now a household name (with all the trappings that come with that), refused.
Kicking fat guys off opens seats at twice the rate, a lot of people forget that.
Fek’s back!
Welcome baktag, Kotter.
Fek left?
@Verbal Kunt
I guess you might say we were
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Feckless.
The flight wasn’t over booked, just full. United Express needed four seats for employees and, using a very odd decision tree, concluded that assault on a seated, paying passenger was the appropriate solution.
Going to stop humming “Welcome to the Machine” for a second and put on my Organizational Theory hat, just to say that it still blows my mind how many organizations (regardless of size) fail to implement Fair Process decision making. It’s a simple idea: if people think the process is fair, they will buy into it. If they think the process is bullshit, they’ll fight the decision even if the outcome is in their own best interest. Vince you nailed it when you stated that everyone involved was conditioned to think “linearly and not laterally.” A rigid decision-making process as demonstrated here leads to stupid avoidable blow-ups all the damn time, god forbid if these corporations ever decide to take a step back and empower their employees to consider social equity and fairness.
FYI if anyone wants to read more about this Fair Process decision making, just click below. I don’t blame you if you don’t since it is Friday and happy hour is almost here:
[hbr.org]
@Mixhail If it helps, I thought the article was fascinating and it helps me understand one problem (of many) that I have with my job.
“- this has been going on so long and lots of us are so used to it that there are now people who side with the machine.”
I didn’t think I was team Skynet but maybe I am. If the police tell you to get up and get off the plane you get up and get off the plane. See, if you don’t, you run the risk of getting hurt. Not to mention the fact that Dr. Dao decided he was more important than everyone else on that flight. People yelling about Trump/Hillary or screaming in Arabic to upset people and get hits for their Youtube channel are assholes and should be dealt with accordingly.
P.S. I’m definitely going to try giving permission to go off script for my next customer service experience. Thanks.
Would I have gotten up and gotten off the plane if I were in his position? Yes. Grumbling and rage tweeting and promising one-star Yelp reviews the entire way. Should you be able to say “no, choose someone else, I paid for my ticket on this flight,” also yes. He apparently thought he was getting singled out. Whatever, he’s a confused old man and a paying customer, leave him alone. By the time the Cops got involved there weren’t many other possible outcomes, but it should never have gotten that far.
An auction with the flight staff raising the voucher amount until someone bit would have gone viral and earned so much goodwill.
I agree.
It’s fair to say that all parties involved acted under poor judgment. To a lesser extant with the passenger and the greatest extent with the Chicago Aviation police. But it was the police response that moved this from the corporate policy feedback loop to what the fuck just happened?
Clearly there needs to be a balance between policies, scripts, etc that ensure consistency (especially as organizational size increases) and allowing for or empowering employees to make reasonable decisions as necessary.
I just can’t get past the dramatic over-reaction by the police/security though.
The cops who beat that guy and dragged him screaming from the plane shoulda just went “no ticket” like Indiana Jones and everyone would have laughed at the funny movie reference and there’d be no problem at all.
Smart. Particularly since Last Crusade is so underrated.
Part of the problem is that the flying experience has become so shitty and it’s gotten so out of hand that no one is willing to show any sort of goodwill to any of the Evil Empire entities involved, whether it’s the airline, the airport bureaucracy, or the security. It’s a tough pill to swallow to have to deal with the rudest, shittiest people on the planet, waste an entire day being belittled by literally every person you encounter, PAYING a huge sum for the privilege, and then having the faceless entity renege on its end of the bargain at the last moment.
You see these horror stories of people having good old fashioned freak outs in the middle of airports and you shake your head and think the guy should just shut up because there’s nothing to be done; but with the kind of Kafkaesque bullying we have to endure now, these types of things happen. And the worst part is that even if an airline actually solved the problem and made the experience tolerable at the cost of a marginally more expensive ticket, no one would pay the difference, even it was $20.
It’s amazing how often these matters fall back to the observations of BF Skinner.
Airlines are upping incentives, and people are already conspiring to figure out to overbook for fun and profit.