Customer Service at Air Canada

Air Canada has a bad repu­ta­tion these days; in many ways they are a case study for what not to do in cus­tom­er ser­vice. I recently flew on Air Canada and had some delays in the flight. The way most of the Air Canada staff handled the situ­ation just proved that bad cus­tom­er ser­vice makes for extremely upset cus­tom­ers. It would have been so easy for Air Canada to not make things worse, if they’d just fol­lowed a couple of basic cus­tom­er ser­vice rules. 

The story: I was com­ing back from the con­fer­ence selec­tion meet­ing, fly­ing from Boston to Van­couver via Montreal. The first flight was delayed by an hour due to mech­an­ic­al prob­lems so I asked at the desk what the altern­at­ives were and what I should do. The answer to (a) was none since altern­at­ive routes were over­sold (in itself a prob­lem) and (b) was that an agent would meet the flight in Montreal and help me get on the flight to Van­couver. At that stage it was show­ing in their sys­tem as a tight con­nec­tion, but not a missed con­nec­tion, so there was hope.

I was in the front seat, first off the plane, and asked the agent who met the flight (Air Canada Montreal agent 1) what to do, expect­ing her to know about the situ­ation since the agents in Boston had expressly said that they were noti­fy­ing Montreal of the prob­lem. She told me to keep going through immig­ra­tion and cus­toms to the flight. Although we had landed at the far end of the ter­min­al, I made it through immig­ra­tion and cus­toms in record time (walk­ing fast and run­ning a lot of the way) and headed to the check-in counter, where I asked about the flight to Van­couver. Air Canada Montreal agent 2 told me to keep going and what gate to head for. So, through secur­ity, and on to the far end of the ter­min­al (of course!). The gate is show­ing noth­ing by that stage so I ask Air Canada Montreal agent 3 where the flight is and she points out the win­dow and says “that’s the one they’re push­ing out now”.

Hav­ing gone all that way and being told to keep going by all the Air Canada staff, and stand­ing there watch­ing the plane being pushed out, I was under­stand­ably and vis­ibly upset. So what does Air Canada Montreal agent 3 do to help? She goes into her office and shuts the door. After I’d calmed down and watched the plane take off, she opened the door, said “you have to go to tick­et­ing to rebook the flight” and shut the door again. 

Even­tu­ally I found my way to the tick­et­ing counter, and finally found an Air Canada agent who was sym­path­et­ic, and offered to call a super­visor to talk to me about what had happened. And for the flight the next morn­ing they put me in busi­ness class (which I figured was the least they could do). The super­visor agreed that I’d done everything right and the vari­ous Air Canada agents I’d run into had done a lot of things wrong. Mind you, I did­n’t get the impres­sion that this was an isol­ated occur­rence, or a prob­lem that is going to be fixed any time soon.

Rather than write a gen­er­al rant about Air Canada, I tried to dis­till a couple of rules from the exper­i­ence that apply to oth­er ser­vice-based com­pan­ies, not just air­lines. What Air Canada did wrong is fairly basic: Air Canada Montreal agents 1 through 3 did­n’t fol­low the under­ly­ing ten­ets of cus­tom­er ser­vice, which are:

1. keep the cus­tom­er informed
2. when things go wrong, be pre­pared to listen and to call a super­visor to fix what can be fixed

Air Canada Montreal agent 1 (who met the flight from Boston) knew of the tight con­nec­tion (I had that con­firmed by the retick­et­ing agent) and should have checked the status so she could tell me wheth­er I’d make the flight or not, rather than duck­ing respons­ib­il­ity and just send­ing me on my way.

Air Canada Montreal agent 2 (whom I asked at the check-in counter) should have said “hold on, let me check” and radi­oed the depar­ture gate of the flight to Van­couver to see if it was worth send­ing me through secur­ity and down the far end of the ter­min­al; they might have held the flight for the 3–4 minutes it took me to get there if it had­n’t already closed.

Air Canada Montreal agent 3 (who was at the neigh­bour­ing depar­ture gate) should have shown some empathy or sym­pathy, listened, and/or offered to call a super­visor. Going in the office and osten­ta­tiously shut­ting the door was not in any way helpful.

The retick­et­ing agent did everything right. One out of four.