Paying For Attention

Few things in life are as frustrating as dealing with a large company's customer service department. All you want is to talk to a human being who has a little bit of compassion for your inconvenience but after calling a hotline and working through 10,000 computer-controlled prompts the person on the other end of the line inevitably turns out to be under-qualified to help with your problem (you would think these companies would give the first line of defense a little more power so they wouldn't need to be constantly running to talk to managers, but no). Even worse, they don't seem particularly concerned about how badly their incompetence is bothering you. After the fourth or fifth call regarding the same issue the "Oh, I'm sorry you're having that issue" line which all companies require their customer service people to begin with starts to sound more like they are mocking you than anything else. What's worse is you start to feel powerless because there is nothing you can do to rage against this machine. These companies may say the customer is always right but we all know they don't believe it because they don't really care about your individual business. You can vow to never use their product again and it won't cause them to alter their behavior because there will still be thousands of people who will. It's a numbers game and you are just one voice in a sea of complaints. And since every other person with an issue thinks theirs is the most important the masses never manage to rally behind one particular gripe, so the fight continues on alone. Sure, you can write and angry blog post or tweet but the world is full of blogs and Twitter accounts and no one wants to spend their free time on the internet hearing about the problems of a stranger, so unless you're a celebrity with hundreds of thousands of followers it won't make much of a dent. It is no wonder perfectly rational people can lose their minds after a while.

Hasan Syed recently experienced the unfortunate situation a lot of people have had when an airline (specifically British Airways) lost his father's luggage. Whenever a passenger's luggage fails to show up with the plane people always have the same reaction - they don't care why it happened, they just want to know where their stuff is now and when it will be arriving where they are. Neither of those seem like particularly unreasonable requests but after dealing with a less-than-helpful lost luggage department, Syed was left without answers. So, he did what a lot of people do when they want to complain about something - he took to the internet. But, the big difference is that while you or I would send out a tweet and have it been seen by a few dozen people, Syed figured out how to manipulate the system. He decided to take advantage of Twitter's advertising policy and promote his own tweet. For those of you who may not be member of the social media site, it works a little something like this: normally the only people who see your Tweets are the people who follow your account. But every now and again a company will decide it is good business to promote something through Twitter and pays them a fee to insert their tweet into everyone's feed. It can be slightly annoying to be reading through comments from people you are actually interested in only to have one of these promoted Tweets in the way, but it can quickly be deleted and forgotten so the annoyance lasts less than a second. Still, the idea gets implanted in my brain so it's a pretty effective way to market an idea or, as in this case, air a grievance.

Syed paid to have his 140 character message promoted in New York and the UK and after one day his simple message of, "Don't fly British Airways. Their customer service is horrendous." was seen by nearly 77,000 people. It cost Syed $1,000 (I also appreciate that everything was grammatically correct. You'd hate to spend your own money to show people you're a crappy speller) but I have to say that at the moment that seems like money well-spent. Dozens of people have gotten behind Syed and begun sharing their stories of how bad British Airways treated them. I'm not saying this was the best protest Twitter has ever seen, but considering the trending topics are usually some nonsense phrase One Direction fans came up with that morning or a false rumor that a quasi-celebrity had died it should definitely be seen as a step in the right direction. As you would imagine British Airways quickly contacted Syed and attempted to solve his problem... eventually. They had some issues clearing up the lines of communication with him, which only showed how bad their customer service really is and probably added to his annoyance. The airline was obviously hoping he would follow up with a Tweet praising them for eventually finding his father's luggage but to the best of my knowledge that hasn't happened yet. Syed has said the fact that British Airways finally contacted him should be considered a victory, which just gives you an indication of how high his frustration level had risen.

Some airline executives have wondered if this will be the start of a new trend but I really don't see this taking off. The first thing which will shut a lot of people down is the money. To the majority of people, $1,000 is a lot of money. I don't know what Syed's father had in his bag but I don't think I own anything that I would spend $1,000 to complain about no longer having. (Come to think of it, I don't even think I own anything which would fit in a suitcase and cost $1,000.) Since he had the money laying around to fund this campaign it is probably not hard to imagine he had much nicer luggage than me. But the main reason I don't see this becoming the new way to vent is that it takes time for this method to pay off. The thing about angry texts are that they need to be sent immediately or else the more rational side of people will take over and they will talk themselves out of it. In these situations, self-awareness is the enemy of action. You may be enraged enough to come up with the idea but it is difficult to maintain that level of intensity long enough to compose your thoughts, get it down to 140 characters, come up with a marketing strategy to optimize your audience and then enter your credit card info and schedule a payment plan. I don't think most people can stay that angry for that long. And if they can you should probably be happy they decided to send a tweet, because they don't sound like the kind of person you would want to try and talk to face-to-face.