United Breaks Guitars

The Facts

A known but not very famous American singer was flying to Chicago with his mates when they saw how the staff who where dealing with the baggage broke his $3.5000 guitar. They told about it to the flight attendants but they said there was nothing they could do about it.

So the singer, Carroll, tried his best to do the complaint following the airline’s rules. It all ended up being a mess, as no one wanted to help or listen to him. When he finally got a reply 9 months after the accident all they said is that it was too late for the complaint as it was meant to be done in the next 24 hours since they happened.

So Carroll decided to complain on an effective and apparently not aggressive way. He made a song explaining what happened and how bad he was treated. He uploaded the video to Youtube, which spread very fast on the Internet and media. When that happened and the airline realised how bad could that affect them they tried to solve it by getting in touch with Carroll. Unfortunately they mess it up once again as they didn’t do it on the popper way. They also offered money to Carroll which he didn’t accept as it was a ridiculous amount for all the damage they did. So it was too late when they reacted. As they were already being affected by all the success of the unusual complaint.

Chain of errors

This could be a clear example of a long chain of errors, which leads to a bad reputation for the company, which at the same time makes them, lose reputation and money.

In my opinion what happened in this case is something that happens lots of times every day. When there’s a problem not many people want to be related or get involved with it. So they just redirect it to someone else in the same company. This it’s a error itself. But if you add a whole chain of people doing it for days and months it just ends up being very annoying for the costumer and makes your own company and yourself ridiculous.

At the beginning of the “chain” we could say there is the person who was dealing with the guitar. He/she was probably not as careful as he/she was meant to be which made the guitar drop to the floor. From here no one wanted to be related to the problem, so the flight attendants (2nd element in the chain) just kind of ignored Carroll. And from here all the other people who didn’t want to be related to it would be more elements of the chain.

After that another big problem I found it would be the fact of telling him that he was out of date to complain as it was the own company’s fault. All this elements just made him more annoyed... enough to compose the song.

How would I have reacted?

Is a fact that companies don’t like people complaining. So it could have been on purpose to avoid the complaint but it didn’t work this time. I would have reacted to it as soon as I knew about

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