A Taylor-Made Complaint for United Airlines

Country Musician Dave Carroll Takes Year-Long Customer-Service Quest Viral

Posted by Charlie Moran on 07.08.09 @ 02:06 PM

So you're a customer, and you have a complaint with a company you've done business with. There's plenty of avenues for airing your grievances: e-mails/phone calls to customer service, Michael Moore-style on-camera showdowns at the corporate headquarters, polite complaints to executives, message boards, flaming bags of poop, Twitter, etc. How about a well-polished anti-jingle with a clever, also-well-done video?

Halifax musician Dave Carroll has not only done that, but he promises he has two more in the works, all decrying the behavior of United Airlines and its treatment of his Taylor guitar. The video for "United Breaks Guitars," which was posted Monday and has thus far notched almost 138,000 views, explains his story quite concisely: Carroll was flying with bandmates, saw a United crew member tossing his and his bandmates' guitars while loading them into the plane, and then, for the next year, United refused to replace his $3,500 broken beauty.

This has probably been done before, but probably never this effectively (what if Carroll had trucked in black metal instead?) and Carroll opted for SEO over poetry in titling it. And, of course, landing on Consumerist sure seems to help in these matters.

Through Twitter, United took about 24 hours to be recalibrate its response, writing: "This has struck a chord w/ us and we've contacted him directly to make it right."

2 Comments

By AgitatedMonk | Wheat Ridge, CO July 8, 2009 05:34:48 pm:

It was bound to happen.

With newer and even less conspicuous technology, even more hostile retaliatory measure will routinely be taken out and leveled at companies around the globe.

While it is sad to see the exhaustive work that many ad executive and company employees put into a campaign can literally be laid to waste overnight; it may produce something positive.

Namely--that senior executives of said companies are mandated by their board and shareholders that they mystery shop their own wares.

Granted, UAL CEO Glenn Tilton has a more complex issue on his hands than most. But it is also safe to suggest that were he on the one recent flight from Sydney to L.A., even he would be appalled at the level of indifference, displayed by the flight crew. About the best way to phrase it would be " Come fly Air Gulage-- spend $15,000.00 and earn triple humiliation points".

A certain amount of consciousness also has to leveled at the creatives. When asked to convince people they can make fondue out of Velveeta--push back.

After all, do you really want to be known as the creative who came up with "The Bankers Pen" on the now defunct Washington Mutual ads?

I doubt it, unless of course you considered it to be "The documentary of a strategic, tragic-comedy manifesto."

Permalink

By nickkinports | Chicago, IL July 9, 2009 09:45:54 am:

I actually used this as an example to one of my clients yesterday - it's what happens these days when big companies try sweep bad customer experiences under the rug rather than admitting a mistake and dealing with the problem head on.

Kudos to the maker of the videos - he certainly deserves some compensation.

Nicholas E. Kinports
Digital Integration Manager, Maddock Douglas
Blog: http://admaven.blogspot.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/admaven

Permalink