I had a really negative experience this weekend with American Airlines that got me to thinking about the nature of providing customer service as a large organization with an equally large number of customers. Is it fundamentally impossible to provide good service on a large scale? What is it that defines customer service? Is it a cost center or is it a profit center? How does treating it as either option affect how you deliver CS?

These questions are all of increasing importance to me as I think about scaling up our (generally good, I think) customer service on our text MUDs to the likely larger population on Earth Eternal. Even though we’re small, underfunded, and completely indie, I would really like to maintain a reputation for good customer service. It’s just one of those things that I’m really attached to as an idea.

In any case, what happened this weekend was that I was scheduled to take my first vacation beyond a 3 day vacation for the last year. I have gone skiing to Colorado (Beaver Creek/Vail) every year for approximately the last 25 years with my parents and 1 or 2 other families that we’re close to, as well as assorted friends of mine, etc. We typically go in late Feb or early March, for somewhere between 7 and 9 days, though I’ve gone for as long as two weeks. It’s literally the only annual tradition I have that means much to me. Birthdays are ok I guess, but they’re always tempered by the fact that I do not appreciate getting older.

This year, due to the amount of work that Earth Eternal has resulted in, I could really only go for a few days, and so was booked to fly out of San Francisco on the 24th, and arrive in Eagle/Vail (15 miles from Beaver Creek), leaving to go back on the 28th. I flew out on time yesterday, arrived in Los Angeles, and found my flight to Eagle/Vail delayed for 14 hours until the next morning, and not for weather. Apparently, they had simply screwed up and mis-scheduled their crew. There are TSA regulations that govern how long airline crews can work, and so because of American’s mistake, the crew couldn’t legally fly.

I had already booked the vacation for the shortest amount of time I felt was worth going for, and taking a whole day of skiing off the vacation left me with flying to Colorado for 2.5 days of skiing. I got the run-around at the airport, waited in line for a couple hours, and just threw up my hands and had them fly me back to SFO, albeit via Las Vegas, on an America West flight.
I left my house at 2:30 pm on Saturday, then via LA and Las Vegas I arrived back home at 3 am Sunday. The most irritating part was that out of the multiple American Airlines people I talked to in the process of effectively cancelling my greatly-looked-forward-to vacation, not a single one apologized. None of them seemed to care one bit about my problem, even though I’d paid their company $450 for my flight. I could have had a video iPod for that price. I should mention, as well, that currently they claim to have no idea where my luggage is and again, nobody has apologized for this incompetence.

Anyway, the point isn’t to complain. Everybody’s aware that very very few big companies manage customer service decently, and that airlines are among the worst of them. The question is why? I’m not going to presume to answer that, but I think that it, in turn, brings up a couple of other questions.

1. What truly upset me about the incident?
2. What could American have done to dampen my anger, and save themselves what is going to be a major customer service hassle, since I’m Hungarian and thus stubborn as hell.

In terms of #1, the obvious answer is that I was enraged because of the iconvenience, and that’s certainly partly true. I am not just angry but genuinely upset that I missed out on my single meaningful annual tradition. The money isn’t the issue, as American will refund the cost of the flight.

What truly got me angry though was the callousness with which I was treated by the airlines. For instance, I went, with a friend I was going to Colorado with, to the departure gate of the flight, and was very brusquely told by the gate agent that, “I’m not helping anyone.” and that, “You have to go to the glassed in area by gate 42.” Off we went.

We waited over an hour in line, got to an agent who promptly told us that he couldn’t help us that and we were going to have to go to another desk in another part of the airport. Off we went.

We got there, waited and waited, and I eventually got put on a flight (without my luggage) to Las Vegas on America West, and then to San Francisco. My friend stayed in LA where he lives.

Now, I’m not even sure if I’ll ever get my bags back. They claim they don’t know where my luggage is, and calling customer service today resulted in a message telling me there was a 133 minute hold time. There’s no chance I’m going to sit on hold for 133 minutes. I did reach someone on another number, but she eventually told me that I’d need to call back later in the day. I did after sitting on hold for half an hour, but was told to call back tomorrow. Nobody’s apologized yet.

This kills me. Perception is reality. If I believe you don’t care, then you don’t care as far as it matters to me. I understand that your agents are harassed. I wouldn’t want their jobs. But I don’t really care. I paid hundreds of dollars to be transported, and I think it’s reasonable to expect a smile and a “What can I do for you?” If I don’t get those kinds of basic common courtesies (especially when I’m trying so hard to smile and be polite rather than indulging in my urge to rip your throat out), my perception is going to be that you don’t care, almost regardless of the circumstances involved. It’s probably not fair, but that’s a customer’s privilege to a limited extent, I feel.

Switching it around, I am frequently on the butt-end of customers upset because a payment was delayed by the postal service or because a their kid stole their credit card and used it to buy credits on one of our games, or because they just don’t like the direction one of the games is going. It’s tempting to let yourself get pretty fed up sometimes, and I’m not a saint, but the fact is, doing business successfully is about perception.

In regards to question #2 above, what American could have done to diminish my rage would have been to simply make me feel like they cared. That’s it. All they have to do is make me feel like they recognize that I’m a human being and that their mistake has seriously inconvenienced me. An apology is a very inexpensive but effective way to change someone’s perception.
Why is this attitude so apparently difficult to perpetuate throughout large organizations though? Nothing I’ve written above is a revelation or contains any particular insight and yet there are precious few large (1000+ employees) organizations that come to mind that manage what I consider good customer service.

Sure, there are the obvious problems of spreading a particular culture through an organization that involves numerous levels in the hierarchy, but beyond that, I think the fundamental problem is the lack of stakeholding among employees. If a person doesn’t feel that he or she has a real stake in the success/image of an organization, it’s pretty difficult to get that person to act as if the customer is his customer rather than the customer of the organization he/she works for. There’s a big difference in those two mindsets. In one, the customer is just someone you’re being paid to service. In the other, the customer is someone you have a personal obligation to. It’s an absolute world of difference.

I’d assume that sales commission structures were created partially to solve this problem, but they, ironically, end up often unintentionally creating behaviors among salespeople that amount to the salespeople treating the customer as simply someone he’s being paid to service. A walking wallet in other words. It’s even worse when there’s a major cost to switching provides, such as with my airline experience. I couldn’t easily just ditch American and move to another carrier, since what I was paying for was very time-sensitive.

Sounds a little like a MUD/MMORPG doesn’t it? Switching costs are high (though for different reasons), and there’s a tendency among certain companies to treat customer service as an afterthought. Emotions run high in both cases: People are quite emotionally/financially invested in getting to where they bought airplane tickets to get to, and people are similarly emotionally/financially invested in their MUD/MMORPG characters. I am quite sure I’m not alone among developers who have received death threats from disgruntled players, and I know that I’ve had urges to smite airline employees on more than one occasion.

I’ve mentioned before that I still handle certain aspects (credit sales-related) customer service for Achaea, and I try hard to treat everyone that emails me as a human being with a valid concern. I’m sure I don’t do a perfect job, but I’m extremely motivated to do so, as Achaea is our biggest game and I’m the majority owner in Iron Realms. I make a point of trying to discard ego and roll with the punches when dealing with customers (which isn’t always easy given the high passions of game players), but can I really expect someone who doesn’t have the same stake in Iron Realms to take the abuse like I would?

We’re a small company, so I like to think we can to some extent but I wonder what will happen when Earth Eternal significantly expands our fanbase. Will we find ourselves stuck in the same cycle of increasingly degenerative customer service that so many companies seem to? MMORPG companies do not typically have a particularly good reputation for service, which motivates me all the more to try and buck that trend.

One idea I’ve had, for which our Earth Eternal team is probably going to shoot me (some of them will read about it here first), is to make everyone (everyone!) spend time handling customer service issues. In fact, that’s typically been the norm in Iron Realms. Virtually every single person, including most (but granted, not all) of the programers, help with customer service. Earth Eternal is a bigger project than we’ve handled before though, and having a lead engineer, for instance, handle customer service makes those customer service communications really expensive, especially when we intend to let people play for free.

In any case, I’m sure there are formal bodies of knowledge dealing with this subject matter, but I’m not familiar with them. I’m just curious what the thoughts of the Forge’s readers are on customer service. What do you want as customers of MMORPGs? What do you think is reasonable in terms of the expectations for developers/publishers, keeping in mind that there’s a limit to what’s reasonable to grant in terms of service to non-paying customers/players?