14 Aug Life and StyleThe Art of the Airline Apology; Carriers Deploy Software, English

Life and StyleThe Art of the Airline Apology; Carriers Deploy Software, English Majors to Tell Angry Fliers They’reSorry for Mistakes in FlightBy Scott McCartney1,154 words9 July 201403:18 PMThe Wall Street Journal OnlineWSJOWSJ.comEnglishCopyright 2014 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.Southwest Airlines uses software to perform triage on upset customers. Computers look for keywords thatshow up in the letters, then sort the notes into four personality categories: Feelers, Drivers, Entertainers andThinkers. Customer relations agents then write to that type of personality."The driver wants bullet points and results. The feeler needs to be caressed. But we close with the sameresult," said Wayne Shaw, Southwest’s director of customer relations.Airlines apologize a lot to their customers. They’ve made a science of saying sorry out of necessity: TheDepartment of Transportation fines airlines for not responding to customers with "substantive" answers togripes.Besides the regulatory requirement of a response within 30 days for disability issues and 60 days for otherproblems, airlines say handling complaints is a crucial part of their business. A good apology can turn anangry customer into a loyal customer; a bad apology can make a bad situation worse."A sincere apology is a hard thing to deliver via email," Mr. Shaw said.Southwest, which was fined $150,000 by the DOT last year for failing to respond to a large number ofcomplaints due to a computer glitch, has 200 agents handling customer complaints. It’s an entry-level job forcollege graduates. Southwest also employs proofreaders, often English majors.United Airlines, which had the highest rate of complaints filed at the DOT among major airlines the past threeyears, has a team of about 450 customer-care agents handling general issues and refunds. Add to that 400people handing frequent-flier program issues and about 100 answering baggage-related letters and emails.Delta Air Lines employs 150 people in Atlanta and Minneapolis to email answers to angry—andcomplimentary—customers. Many get letter-writing training and are experienced airport agents used todealing directly with customers.Airlines say they try to make responses conversational and personal. They aim to apologize andacknowledge the problem, providing more information about the particular situation after research, thenoffering some compensation as a goodwill gesture, such as some frequent-flier miles. Letters are signed byan employee, though many use pseudonyms.Complaints are sorted by complexity and by the value of the customer—top-tier frequent fliers and bigspenders get priority. A low-level customer may get 3,000 frequent-flier miles for a canceled flight, while ahigh-value customer who complains is soothed with 10,000 miles.Agents research incidents to verify and provide explanations. Complaints also are tracked so airlines can pegfrequent complainers trawling for extra miles or discounts.Customer feedback is compiled into reports for top executives, and individual letters—complaint orcompliment—do get forwarded to supervisors and employees, airlines say.Page 1 of 3 © 2014 Factiva, Inc. All rights reserved.American Airlines uses a library of responses built over the years that agents can search and then customize.That allows for consistency and accuracy in responses. "We’ve gone completely away from corporate-speakto personally showing empathy," said John Romantic, American’s managing director of service recovery.United said it tries not to go overboard on the apology. "Generally we tell the customer we are sorry they didnot have the experience they expected on United," spokesman Rahsaan Johnson said. "We try to beempathetic to the customer but not sound insincere."Delta gives its agents freedom to be chatty and personal. That strategy backfired with Margery Rothenberg, ahealth-care marketing executive from the New York City area who hit her head hard on the corner of arow-number sign protruding above her seat on a Delta jet last month."I saw stars," she said. A flight attendant brought her ice and told her it happens all the time; the captainencouraged her to complain to delta.com.She did, attaching pictures in hopes the airline would realize the signs, with a protruding corner sticking outabove passenger heads, are a hazard."Unfortunately, you were hurt by a seat marker. That truly sounds unpleasant, and you should have a nicerexperience on our plane," a Delta agent wrote. "Although, our flight attendant offered you ice there was abump at the place of injury. We’re working hard to clean, modernize, and maintain our planes."Ms. Rothenberg, still with a big bump on her head a week after the incident, wasn’t mollified. "The sentenceconstruction is awkward and childish, and I felt like it wasn’t really written to me in a personal way," she said.The offer of 3,500 Delta SkyMiles "left me feeling very shortchanged and unappreciated," she said.Asked for comment on the response to Ms. Rothenberg, Delta reached out to her again offering 10,000 milesand asked if she needed medical attention. Hers was the first complaint about the protruding signs, thecompany said, and the airline would look into the potential hazard further.As for the language of the apology, "they are more individually written" than in past years, said Deltaspokesman Russell Cason. Agents get training in language and no longer use form letters."We are trying to use a more conversational language and tone," Mr. Cason said.Edwin Battistella, an English professor at Southern Oregon University and author of a book on publicapology, says too often apologies say very little, stating the obvious and avoiding responsibility.The letter to Ms. Rothenberg "is not so much an apology as an excuse. They’re not really sorry for anythingthey did. They’re sorry for the injury," he said. "It’s an attempt to manage the situation rather than resolve it."Good apologies are direct: They identify what the transgressor did wrong, take responsibility and either saywhat will be different in the future or offer some compensation, he said.It’s hard to imagine an industry with more direct correspondence with angry customers than airlines. Theindustry proactively apologizes to customers who suffer long delays or get stuck after cancellations, instantlysending emails with offers of miles or discounts before passengers get home and get a chance to complain.When passengers do write to the airline, the DOT or both, most complaints revolve around flightproblems—delays and cancellations.A 2009 study by researchers at the University of Nottingham’s School of Economics in the United Kingdomfound that apologies can be more valued by customers than even compensation.More than 600 customers of the German eBay site who posted neutral or negative reviews of a transactionwere sent an apology or compensation of under $7 to withdraw their online evaluation. Nearly 45% ofcustomers who received the apology withdrew the evaluation, compared with about 21% of those who gotcompensation."Our results suggest that firms apologize so much because apologies do indeed influence customers’behavior," the study concluded.Document WSJO000020140709ea79006soSearch SummaryTextairline apologyDateIn the last weekPage 2 of 3 © 2014 Factiva, Inc. All rights reserved.SourceAll SourcesAuthorAll AuthorsCompanyAll CompaniesSubjectAll SubjectsIndustryAll IndustriesRegionAll RegionsLanguageEnglishResults Found1Timestamp11 July 2014 3:52 PMPage 3 of 3 © 2014 Factiva, Inc. All rights reserved.EnterpriseSmall BusinessEntrepreneurs ‘Tweet’ Their Way Through Crises — Twitter Helps Companies Cope With SiteCrashes, Weather Delays; ‘You Can’t Do That With a 1-800 Number’By Sarah E. Needleman802 words15 September 2009The Wall Street JournalJB5English(Copyright (c) 2009, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)Twitter has turned out to be a useful tool for some small businesses coping with customer-service orpublic-relations crises.The social-media service — where users send short "tweets" to followers who have signed up to receive themessages — came in handy for Innovative Beverage Group Holdings Inc., whose drankbeverage.com sitecrashed last month after a surge in traffic following a segment on Fox News for the company’s so-calledrelaxation beverage, which contains "calming" ingredients like valerian root and melatonin. News Corp. ownsFox News as well as The Wall Street Journal.Innovative Beverage notified consumers on its Twitter feed that it was working to resolve the problem. Thecompany also did a search on Twitter for mentions of the site crash, so it could respond with tweetsdescribing its repair efforts.Peter Bianchi, Innovative’s chief executive, says the site’s meltdown was devastating, since a small businessrarely receives national TV coverage. But he says the 12-hour site crash didn’t appear to have any lastingdamage and online sales of the beverage peaked the following day to their highest level to date."Twitter gave us an up-to-the-minute ability to take what would normally be a crisis situation and make it justanother event," says Mr. Bianchi. "You can’t do that with a 1-800-number."As of Monday, drankbeverage.com had more than 1,000 Twitter followers.Twitter also helped wine critic Gary Vaynerchuk respond quickly after his company’s Web site, Corkd.com,was hacked so that visitors were greeted with pornography.While technicians plugged away at the problem, which took about eight hours to resolve, Mr. Vaynerchuksays he shot a video of himself apologizing to customers of the wine-review site. He then posted it on avideo-hosting site and linked to the footage from Twitter, where he has nearly 900,000 followers.Mr. Vaynerchuk, who owns New-York based Cork’d LLC, also tweeted apologies to about 65 people whotweeted about the incident. "Every person that mentioned Cork’d on Twitter got a message from me and alink to the video," he says.Mr. Vaynerchuk says his Web site saw no drop in traffic during the days that followed. He also receivedabout 75 emails from customers complimenting him on how he handled the matter.To be sure, Twitter can also be the root of a problem for entrepreneurs. Virginia Lawrence, a director atBallantines PR, a boutique agency in Los Angeles, monitors Twitter daily on behalf of several smallbusinesses for tweets that could harm their reputations.Recently, she says she found several criticizing a client that were from a former employee the firm had fired.The dismissed worker "was saying negative things about how the company was run, as if they were doingillegal things," she says. Ms. Lawrence notified the client, who then approached the terminated employeeabout the matter, and soon after the scurrilous tweets stopped.Page 1 of 22009 Factiva, Inc. All rights reserved.Twitter can also be an effective way to get a message across to consumers in an emergency. When an icestorm struck the Bartlesville, Okla., area last winter, United Linen & Uniform Services notified customersabout the status of their orders through Twitter in addition to its Web site. Scott Townsend, marketingdirector for the laundry service, says many consumers today will find information about a business on Twitterbefore anywhere else because it’s where they hang out online. "You fish where the fish are," he says.Mr. Townsend adds that while email was also an option, entering customers’ addresses would have beentedious and time-consuming.Entrepreneurs should bear in mind that Twitter is unlikely to be of help in dealing with a problem if it isn’tused regularly otherwise, says Shel Israel, author of "Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the NewGlobal Neighborhoods.""If you just go to Twitter when you have a crisis, you will have no followers and no credibility," he says. "Thekey to using Twitter effectively is to build trust with people who are relevant to your business."Steve Fusek, owner of Fusek’s True Value LLC, a hardware store in Indianapolis, now has an employeededicated to updating the shop’s Twitter profile during business hours. Mr. Fusek says consumers expect tosee frequent tweets and swift responses to customer-service inquiries they post."You can’t just sign up and leave it. You have to have someone on it," he says. "If you’re not legitimate, you’llbe found out quickly."License this article from Dow Jones Reprint ServiceDocument J000000020090915e59f0000mPage 2 of 22009 Factiva, Inc. All rights reserved.AdvertisingThick Fashion Magazines Are So Last Year — Once-Hefty September Editions Lose Ads as ApparelMarketers Cut Back and Experiment More OnlineBy Emily Steel955 words17 August 2009The Wall Street JournalJB1English(Copyright (c) 2009, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)Fashion magazines’ September issues are usually nice and fat, bursting with new looks for cold weather.This year, some are almost as skinny as the models inside.Behind the relatively svelte issues are newly frugal fashion advertisers, slashing their budgets in therecession and experimenting with putting more ad dollars to use on the Web.High-end fashion brands such as Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Emporio Armani, Dolce & Gabbana and Prada arestill buying ads in the glossy pages of Conde Nast’s Vogue and W, Hachette Filipacchi’s Elle, Time Warner’sInStyle and Hearst’s Harper’s Bazaar. But most of the September issues, which started showing up onnewsstands last week, are almost a third slimmer than last year’s batch.Ad pages in Vogue tumbled 36%, to 429. That’s a far cry from 2007, when Vogue trumpeted its Septemberissue as a record-setter among monthly consumer magazines, with a total of 840 pages — 727 of them ads– and weighing in at 4 pounds, 9 ounces.As they spend less on magazines, the fashion companies are gingerly testing a range of lower-cost, oftenmore measurable outlets. These include social messaging site Twitter, Google’s video site YouTube, fashionand culture email newsletter DailyCandy.com and Glam Media, an Internet property targeted at women.They are reallocating some of their marketing dollars to buy space in new features on magazine Web sites,such as a shopping tool on Conde Nast’s Style.com that will launch during New York Fashion Week inSeptember.It is a notable — if tentative and uneasy — shift. For years, fashion advertisers resisted digital marketing.They believed they couldn’t find their target audiences online and that Internet ads didn’t offer the rightaesthetic to showcase their high-end wares, says Shenan Reed, managing director and founder ofMorpheus Media, a New York digital ad agency that works with brands including Louis Vuitton, MichaelKors, Armani and Diane von Furstenberg."They’ve been stuck in the Victorian Age, and the Industrial Age, for some time. Times were good for the lasttwo years, and the marketers were fighting the need to go online," says Milton Pedraza, chief executive ofthe Luxury Institute, a New York consumer-research firm. "Now, it’s an absolute necessity."Data from WPP’s ad tracking firm TNS Media Intelligence show a significant uptick in the ad spending thatfashion marketers are devoting to the Web. Louis Vuitton North America more than doubled its digital adspending in 2008 to $286,000, from $107,000 in 2007, TNS reports. Diane von Furstenberg boosted its Webspending from nothing to $43,000 last year.It doesn’t amount to much yet, but it represents one of the few slices of the industry’s marketing budget thatare expanding. In addition, the data track spending on display ads but not other types of digital ads, such assearch and online video — and they don’t account for the cost of creating a Web site."These are advertisers where luxury and perfection and style is first and foremost. The Web experience waspretty cluttered. Now that there are bigger screens on desks, hi-def, beautiful video in real time, iPhone appsthat look beautiful, the aesthetics have gotten to a place they are interested in," says Drew Schutte, seniorvice president and chief revenue officer for Conde Nast Digital, which is trying to boost the number of adpackages it sells that include both print ads and digital ads. Conde Nast is a unit of Advance Publications.Page 1 of 22009 Factiva, Inc. All rights reserved.It wasn’t until recently that major brands such as Prada built sites that displayed more than a picture; buyingdigital ads to send consumers to these sites was pointless. Now that the sites are more robust, withe-commerce options, news and videos, brands are buying online ads to drive traffic there. Several print adsin the pages of the fashion magazines also point consumers to their Web sites."Online is considered an investment now. They are not just throwing money to a channel that they don’tknow," says Federico Marchetti, founder of Yoox Group, which designs Web sites and online marketingcampaigns for brands including Emporio Armani, Dolce & Gabbana and Emilio Pucci.To capture some of the dollars flowing to the Web, traditional magazine companies are introducing newfeatures. The e-commerce initiative launching on Conde Nast’s Style.com in September lets users shop fortrends they see on the runway. Net-A-Porter, Nine West, Neiman Marcus and New York & Co. all areadvertising on the site at launch."With limited marketing funds, we felt this was a smart and thoughtful way to create brand awareness for ourcompany," says Celia Rao Visconti, chief marketing officer at New York & Co., which just started marketingonline this year.Others have started experimenting with social media. Chanel posted a short film to YouTube, starringFrench actress Audrey Tautou, and promoted the video with search ads and other ads on the site. Otherfashion brands are attracting sizable flocks on Twitter. Louis Vuitton, which has more than 26,000 followers,provides information about new products and events on its Twitter feed.The question now is whether it’s all a recessionary fad or a lasting trend. Joe Lagani, vice president ofGlam.com, says it’s more than a blip."It’s hard to keep people on the farm once they’ve seen the big city," he says.License this article from Dow Jones Reprint ServiceDocument J000000020090817e58h00028Page 2 of 22009 Factiva, Inc. All rights reserved.

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