Q: What are the areas where United Airlines has the most work to do to improve the customer experience?
A: It’s really being able to individualize the experience while still managing the large volume of guests that we greet on a daily basis, recognizing that an occasional traveler has pretty different needs than a frequent traveler or business traveler.
I was speaking with one of our guests who said he got on the aircraft for a long-haul international flight. The flight attendant wanted to know what he wanted for dinner. He said, ‘I need to arrive at my destination and go straight into a meeting, so I’m just going to sleep. What I’d really like is a bottle of water and an apple.’ When he woke up there was a bottle of water and an apple. On his return trip, he fell asleep right when the plane took off, and when he woke up there in front of him was a bottle of water and an apple. The flight attendant was on the same flight and remembered him.
That type of thing would be wonderful if we could get to know every traveler on an individual level. A leisure traveler, who doesn’t have to hit the ground running, they really want to spend time on that flight enjoying the meal.
Q: What are the challenges United faces in improving the customer experience? How does that compare to Disney?
A: When I worked at The Walt Disney Co., guests did not necessarily come to visit us every week or every couple of days. Here in the airline industry, we see some of our most frequent travelers day in and day out. It’s easier for us to get to know what’s really important to them, and it can be difficult because there’s a lot of variability that’s outside of our control. So for our ability to deliver this consistent product and service day in and day out, sometimes we have a lot stacked up against us – such as flight cancellations due to weather.
Q: How do you deal with the challenge of improving the customer experience when there are fewer employees in call centers and other areas of the company?
A: Not everything is really related to the amount of staff you have, but it’s really what processes you have in place. Certainly reducing staffing and not changing a process may not necessarily lead to a good outcome, but in many cases there are ways to do things a lot more efficiently and more productively that don’t necessarily require as many people.
Q: Why do you think United ranked lowest among airlines in the University of Michigan customer satisfaction index this year?
A: The reason for getting that result largely happened in 2006. There are things that are going to be unavoidable, unfortunately, that are realities of air travel that have to do with weather and things that are happening with the air traffic control system.
But how communicative we are, how easy we are to interact with, those are things that certainly we control and obviously the University of Michigan rankings showed us that we were not doing a great job in those areas. We’ve put lots of things in place since that time.
Q: How do you find out about customer complaints?
A: There’s a lot of different ways. We have surveys. Every flight you take on United Airlines you can respond to an online survey and there are places for guests to make comments. Guests can reach out to us and write us.
I’m actually out on the airplanes quite a bit so I talk to people directly. We take everything really seriously and work together to find out if things are isolated incidents or if there are really root causes that we need to identify and try to correct.
Q: How much control do you have over managing the customer experience generally during irregular operations, such as during storms?
A: My experience at Disney taught me that having things go wrong does not necessarily have to really result in a negative experience. In many cases if something goes wrong and we’re able to recover from it, our guests are more loyal. So we have a great deal of control in how we react when things go wrong.
Edited for space and clarity from an interview by staff writer Kelly Yamanouchi.
