Apparently, United Broke A Guitar

Every day you can go on consumerist.com and see how consumers are getting their worst customer service problems fixed.  The story goes like this:

1. Company does bad thing.
2. Customer complains and company refuses to apologize for bad thing.
3. Customer posts story on blog/twitter/facebook/youtube
4. Company stops doing bad thing and apologizes with some material compensation.

It's so much a ritual of customer service kabuki that consumerist.com posts telephone directories of senior management at major consumer brands to help people accomplish this, and every weekday usually brings one or more stories to the website.  Usually consumers are happy at that point if both sides are being reasonable.

I've even done this after a bad experience with a one-way rental at Enterprise Rent-A-Car.  Highly familiar with the kabuki, and not wanting to wait, I wrote my blog post about Enterprise Rent-A-Car and sent it to the PR contacts for the company.  Within 24 hours I got a call and it was rectified.

A buddy of mine here in the Bay area had a run in with a local cycle shop over a $35 broken crank.  He blogged about it, and because there's not a lot of competition for the search term, his complaint made the top 10 of Google results for the cycle shop.  He took it down over the weekend after the cycle shop gave him a new bike worth more than $1,500.

Recently a Canadian musician, Dave Carroll, witnessed United baggage handlers poorly handling his guitar from the window of the plane.  Per the kabuki he followed up and was treated really badly.  He then made a YouTube video about it, which became wildly popular.  How popular?  Well, check out this graph of google searches related to his incident:

The top, light blue line is Google searches for "United Breaks Guitars".  The other are similar searches like "United breaks guitar" and "Taylor guitars", which is the brand that United destroyed.  The video currently has about 2.5 million views.

Sometime after Carroll's video garnered a million or so views on YouTube, United offered to buy Carroll a new guitar in exchange for him stopping his musical campaign.  No dice, he said.  He spent nine months trying to fix this the normal way, and he says he has two more songs and videos in him before he's done with this topic.

This will eventually pass, as do all isolated customer service incidents, assuming this is truly isolated.  Since United cannot stop Carroll from doing the next two videos, they should be quickly fixing their internal processes to avoid creating any more Dave Carrolls. 

As spoken so truthyfully by others more pithy than me, the secret to solving customer service brand crises is simple in theory:

1. Stop doing the bad thing.
2. Apologize for the bad thing.
3. Make material restitution for the bad thing you did.

However, as Dave Carroll shows, if you did a really bad thing and then made it worse in the aftermath, you may have to wait a few weeks to get your apology accepted.