The Potential Price of a Single Bad Incident

In a painful reminder that not all outsourcing is good outsourcing, The Charlotte Observer ran an article titled, “US Airways revisits outsourcing,” which opens with an anecdote about a guy who wanted to reserve tickets for a family vacation next summer. When he couldn’t understand the person he was talking to at the center handling US Airways calls, he asked to speak to a supervisor, and he was cut off instead. Ouch.

During the summer, the airline had shuttered its Pittsburgh customer service center completely and shrunk the one in Winston-Salem to handle only calls from elite-level frequent fliers and other specialty groups. Everybody else is now shuttled to a call center in either Mexico City (Atento, a Latin America- and South America-based company) is the service provider there) or Manila (PRC is the service provider there). In that process US Airways sliced about 1,150 customer service reps from its payroll. Last year, the airline also tacked on a $5 service fee to use its service center; customers who order through the Web pay no fee.

My guess is that some of the snafus are just part of the learning curve; but I wonder if the airline even knew about the incident before the article came out in a major daily newspaper.

Of course, the company is now partnered with America West, which makes a point of keeping its customer service operations in centers in Reno, NV and Tempe, AZ. The company considers its customer service of value -- something to distinguish it from its competitors. So we may be reading soon that new CEO Doug Parker, who comes from the America West side, has decided to revisit how customer service is handled for the larger organization.

I wonder if the name that was chosen for the newly formed entity -- US Airways -- was perhaps the wrong direction to go. Not only is it the name of the company that declared bankruptcy before the sale, but also could it become synonymous with mismanaged customer service that the customer needs to pay for?