The United Airlines Board of Directors has been silent this week over the UA3411 controversy. Until now.
In a letter directed to employees, the Chairman Robert Milton offers his take on what happened and what United will do about it. The full letter–
Dear fellow members of the United family,
We on the board of directors have been meeting and talking regularly this week and working with Oscar and the management team in the aftermath of Sunday’s terrible event. We are deeply sorry and upset about what happened, and our apologies and sympathies go to Dr. David Dao and all those on UA 3411.
We are supporting Oscar and his team as they work to assure that something like this does not happen again. That means, as you have heard, changes to our policies of when we will ask law enforcement officers to come onto our planes and our procedures when there is an oversold situation.
But we have to learn from this incident and do more than merely make sure it does not happen again. We need to use this regrettable event as a defining moment and pivot off it to craft friendly policies and redouble our efforts to win back the trust of everyone – something I know we will do. United Airlines is a great company, with tens of thousands of professional people committed to safety and devoted to serving our customers. The management team is exploring a lot of creative initiatives, and the board will give them the support they require to redouble our efforts to be truly customer-focused in everything we do, every hour of the day, the world over.
Our company will need your ideas and everyone’s ideas, large and small, on how we can bring a smile to the faces of our customers with acts of kindness, service, respect, and understanding. We will need to think creatively and be dedicated to this purpose with true and sustained intensity. We will need to organize around it, build a culture that values it, and processes that facilitate it. When we do, we will have used this sad event as the catalyst to build a better airline that enables us to feel pride in how we make other people’s lives better.
All my best,
Robert
Robert A. Milton, Chairman of the Board, United Airlines
The Last Paragraph is Key
The last paragraph strikes me as the most important. If bringing a smile to the face of a customer becomes an end in itself, a separate policy goal from the ultimate goal of making money, we will see an improvement in customer service.
As in everything, how far United goes to bring a smile to the face of a customer will be determined by cost/benefit analysis. United’s Surprise and Delight program certainly brought a smile to my face when I was invited to bypass even Global Service members to board a flight first.
But United’s target needs to be the inexperienced and occasional flyers, not frequent flyers who are used to United and do not plan to deviate.
CONCLUSION
I share the Board’s hope that this incident will be “a defining moment” that, when scrutinized many years into the future, will be seen as the moment that redefined the way United treats its customers.
Top image courtesy of United
How about GPUs don’t have fare requirements and clear if a seat is available for sale. I have several GPUs and RPUs which I apply to flights, they don’t clear, and I get them back, then they expire.
How about this for starters:
1. Clean your airplanes between flights
2. Absent blizzards, tornadoes, locusts, fly ON TIME
3. Create an early retirement program for your employees who do not enjoy working with customers
4. Jettison United Express and replace it wih mainline service or do not bother with those cities that cant support mainline. United Express is too far gone to save.
5. Stop copying Delta and fix Mileage Plus.
Do this and you will be fine.
1. I’m pretty sure that they already do… and they don’t make FAs do it
2. They can fix congestion by lessening departure banks but, they’re in the same line with Delta planes etc. Also, rainstorms?
3. They can’t directly control it but, they can encourage them to retire
4. Can also be fixed with new generation RJs (CS 100 and 300, MRJ, etc.)
5. They aren’t quite as bad as Delta, at least they still have award charts
UA has to win us back, the same way they sell us seats – one at a time. They’re coming from well below zero right now.
Well, Robert Milton asked for our ideas. Here are 2 that I’m waiting for:
(1) a new CEO, so that United can have a clean start and move in a different direction
(2) some firings of United policymakers, upper level employees, perhaps employees directly involved w/the incident– because what happened was THAT serious.
We need a replacement for SHARES. How come no one is mentioning that? SHARES is still slow and extremely inefficient. If SHARES worked better (and employees had more authorization to go above and beyond their stated job description – and without being fired by UA for doing so), then overbooking/re-accommodating/etc. would overall be quicker and smoother. This would make for a happier customer. I am sure the gate agent on UA 3411 just threw her hands up in the air (and couldn’t be bothered to tackle the silliness that SHARES provides), and just called in the goon squad that later beat Dr. Dao.
If Oscar really wants to fix the situation, then his employees need the proper tools to provide better customer service to passengers. This starts with a replacement for SHARES.
I cannot be the only one that sees SHARES as the root cause for almost all evil at UA.
I just spent 4 hours on the phone being transferred to 11 different people who all told me different things in regards to using my United credit card miles to book a flight. I also had an e ticket voucher from being threatened with security removal from the plane from last summer. So United has a long long way to go to improve customer service,