Everywhere I turn, I keep seeing stories about airline passengers stuck on the runway for several hours. Didn’t these airlines learn their lessons from JetBlue’s Valentine’s Day Masacre?

What’s extremely interesting to me is two stories this week from Delta flights, where passengers took videos of their ordeal. The first story is a Delta commuter flight stuck on the tarmac for hours with no air conditioning. See the video here.

The second one (picked up from the consumerist) is well edited and chronicles what is becoming commonplace in the airline industry. Let’s see if these videos prompt change.

It’s amazing how something so small can make such a difference between good service and poor service. When I took my Ted flight between Chicago and Orlando, the flight attendants were rude and unaccomodating. A couple of weeks ago, I took a flight from Chicago to Orlando on American Airlines. Everything was pretty much equal in terms of the people traveling (my wife, 2 year old, and me) and the flight times.

When I boarded the American flight, I asked them for a container of milk for my son to drink to help him fall asleep. Before the flight took off (and in the chaos of the boarding process), we got our milk and our son was a happy camper for the 2 hour flight.

Contrast this to Ted (United’s poor excuse for a no frills airline) where the flight attendants ran out of many beverages (including milk) both directions, refused to give us an entire can of our beverage, and were extremely rude throughout the flight.

Giving us a carton of milk prior to boarding may seem like something little, but it sure helped the flight go much smoother for us.

Just when you think that a company can’t be any more rediculous, one surprises you. I sent my sprint phone back to Sanyo and got a voice mail back saying that they will not replace the phone because it’s showing slight water damage and corrosion on the charging connectors.

Since I know that the phone hasn’t been exposed to water, I called for a more detailed explanation. The rep I spoke with at Sanyo (Wendy), put me on hold while she talked with a tech. The explanation from the tech was that normal temperature changes caused by the change of seasons creates air moisture that will cause this type of corrosion.

I don’t know about how this sounds to you, but it sounds like Sanyo has produced a defective product when exposure to air will corrode the phone. I then spoke with a supervisor (Robin), who gave me the same explanation. What does make me laugh (before getting pissed off) is that this seemed completely acceptable to Sanyo. Has anyone else had this type of problem?

Sure, most people love to complain about their cell phone service. I guess I’m not much different in that respoect.

 I used to be with AT&T (now Cingular), but switched to Sprint 4 years ago. I have yet to have a positive experience with Sprint. A caveat to everyone who talks with customer service from any company (especially cell phone companies)… get the name of who you talk with and document every aspect of the phone call.

A year ago, my contract expired with Sprint. After approximately 3 hours spent bouncing around to different departments, supervisors, and countries (they use call centers across the globe to save money), I finally screamed loud enough so that they gave me the new customer deal of week. Of course, this required me to sign up for another 2 years of service. I documented every aspect of each of the calls I made. On the final call, I specifically requested that I wanted the insurance on the phone. Of course, it wasn’t documented properly by the Sprint agent, which basically means that it never happened.

 Following allong with Murphy’s Law, my wife’s phone started having problems 9 months into the contract. I went into the Sprint service center expecing to get the phone fixed and was surprise that I didn’t have the insurance. 2 more hours wasted on the phone with Sprint got me nowhere. They gave me the number for Sanyo since the phone was under warranty.

To be continued…

As the VP of Marketing and Business Development for AccuQuote , we’re doing some things to improve our customer service that most companies should be doing. A novel idea that big companies typically don’t think about… we’re asking our customers what they think of us!

 It started with a blog post at AccuQuoteBlog.com , and then was followed up by emailing the post to all of the AccuQuote customers. The response was overwhelming. We had plenty of people who loved every aspect of our service as well as people who were frustrated by either our service or the overall life insurance process in general, as well as every response in between.

 We made sure that we responded within 1 business day to everyone who took the time to give us feedback. In addition, we took the suggestions and are now working on the plans to turn the feedback into the action needed to improve some of our service shortfalls. Every business can improve and AccuQuote is no different. The difference is that AccuQuote has created the dialogue with our customers in order to improve what matters to our customers the most!

When I decided to setup this site, I was concerned about how much time and effort it would take just to launch it. After all, I’m a marketing guy, not a programmer or IT expert.

Go Daddy was awesome. I was able to register the domain, sign up for a basic web hosting package, and start uploading material to the site within hours. What really impressed me is that during the time I was signing up for the web hosting package, they asked for a time and phone number so that my personal support person could give me a call, introduce herself, and help me with any challenges I may have run into. Tiffany called me right on schedule and walked me through changing my hosting package (I picked the wrong one to run my blog software) and making a couple other changes. The few times I’ve needed questions answered, I have always received prompt, friendly and above all else, extremely helpful service. What a great customer experience they gave me, and as a result I’ve been telling everyone that will listen to me how impressed I am by Go Daddy.

I’m sitting on a flight from Chicago to Orlando in June 2006 absolutely fuming. What was I thinking??? I had the worst airline customer service of my life the last time I flew Ted (operated by United), and yet I chose to fly this airline again. Wrong move!

It was like the flight attendants were purposely being as rude and obnoxious as possible in order to out do each other. As I sat with my wife and 17 month old son thinking about what to write to United, I was inspired to let my voice be heard in a larger medium. Thus, The Customer Voices was born.

I’ll share my experiences, and I’m also looking for all your customer services stories, the good, the bad, and the nighmares.