“Acceptable” is UNacceptable.
From the “Everything You Do Is Marketing” field file:
This pretty much says it all re the root cause of the alrlines’ service problems - the ‘tude, Man, the ‘tude:
Workers at American found that printers that produce adhesive tags for bags were often dirty. That made bar codes hard to read, leading to misdirected bags. Regular wiping of the printer heads helped, but even with a clean printer, the bar code readers are only about 90 to 92 percent accurate, said Denise P. Wilewski, manager of airport services for American here.
FWe never hit 100 percent — 90 percent is acceptable,” she said.
Betcha Ms. Wilewski wouldn’t find this acceptable if it were her bag.
As long as companies strive for mediocrity, they’re going to consistently produce and deliver crap. And that should be UNacceptable to all of us.
From NYT: Travelers’ Odds Decline on Airline Baggage
(P.S. Those printer heads have always been problematic. Over 10 years ago I worked for a company that serviced them, and the spare parts cost alone was incredible…but wouldn’t you think American could have figured out to fix this problem in - oh say - five or six years…if they actually cared about it?)
Related Posts:
Your Brand: It’s the ‘tude, Man.
Service Snafu: “You’re Overweight.”
View the Blog Roll
November 26th, 2007 at 2:20 pm
And this be why I have such a loathing of the SLA’s (Service Level Agreements) that are so rampant in the IT Industry. IMNSHO SLA’s set a *maximum* standard that a supplier knows they can easily meet without doing anything to improve service.
Personally? I offer my clients Best Effort. Which usually equals 100% uptimes/availability. Any failure is a personal and professional blow.
Had to reboot and patch our primary database server to enable an Oracle upgrade a few months ago. That particular server had an uptime of 907 days. Nine Hundred and Seven. I felt like I was putting down a favoured pet.
Oh yes. And with that bounce/upgrade? Zero impact on the users of a 24×7 system.
Cheers!
- Steve
November 26th, 2007 at 2:56 pm
Steve,
You mean…like actually do a good job? Do the right thing by your customers? Surely you jest!
November 26th, 2007 at 3:03 pm
Gosh! You’re right!!! What am I doing!!!!!!!!
My Apologies. I’ll aim for mediocre service in future.
Again, my humble (albeit slightly ironic) Apologies.
- Evil Steve
November 29th, 2007 at 8:20 am
This reminds me of an excellent IBM ad many years ago with the headline: If Your Defect Rate Is One In A Million, What Do You Tell That One Person?
November 29th, 2007 at 8:41 am
And how would we feel about “Our planes only crash 10% of the time.”
December 5th, 2007 at 8:22 am
[…] As a follow-on to my recent post Acceptable is UNAcceptable. […]