Word of mouth is really powerful – so much so, that most companies know it’s not worth cutting corners that will give them a bad rep. But not all companies.
My partner and I regularly fly between Zurich and London to visit one another, spending thousands of pounds on flights each year with a well-known Swiss airline. Recently, while booking a flight, he accidently gave his own name as the passenger instead of mine. Tisk. I didn’t think it would be a big deal. We book on average three flights a month and considered ourselves valued customers. But after one hour on the phone to customer services and ten different call handlers, we were charged a further £300 for a flight we’d already bought for £190! Aaargh!
Nobody on the customer service line had the authority to help us. We hadn’t checked in for the flight, so the cost to the company of making the name switch on the booking would presumably have been a good deal less than the hour’s wages for the call handler. The lack of goodwill from this airline has permanently lost it our future custom.
Small potatoes maybe – what’s a few thousand pounds to this airline? Not much, and ten years ago the company might have got away with it. But today the damage to brand reputation caused by a disgruntled customer is not just the ten friends and colleagues they might tell about their bad experience – it stretches to the many thousands they might tell online. Imagine what a sales boost this post could have given Swiss Air Lines if it had simply changed the name on the ticket.
No company can afford to underestimate the power of word of mouth – for good or bad.
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