Dear Lufthansa, Again
Hi! You might not remember me from my last letter, but as you’ve not yet replied to that I didn’t think it would be too much of a bother to write again in case the last one got lost in the post or something.
It’s now, let’s see.. day seventeen (long enough that I had to use Wolfram Alpha to calculate that) since my 5-year-old’s suitcase didn’t get loaded onto LH444 at Frankfurt, and about twelve days since we were told that said suitcase had eventually got as far as Atlanta before being stolen in its entirety while being processed there. I think that also makes it twelve days since we followed the advice of your helpful baggage office at Atlanta to email your Customer Relations address to start a conversation about resolving what had been described to us, I think quite accurately, as A Situation. (Incidentally, I now know that if an American uses the phrase “A Situation” in a manner where you can hear them pronouncing the capital letters you should assume that the situation is so terminally serious that a British person would describe it as “a spot of bother”.)
But we still haven’t heard from you! I feel quite hurt. It’s as if you don’t care. I’m sure you do care and that it’s mean of me to even suggest that you don’t, though — I know you do! Your autoresponder told us that you do, and who are we to doubt it? When the chips are down, though, the robotic platitudes of an autoresponder are no substitute for the carefully crafted words of a human, or at least some carefully noncommittal Legal-approved boilerplate response text selected by a human.
We do know, however, that you’re very busy. We’ve been told that quite a few times — indeed, you seem to have an entire communications infrastructure dedicated to telling people how busy you are. Your social media team do a wonderful and dedicated job within the limits of the powers you’ve given them. They soothe the ruffledly indignant feathers of frequent flyers who didn’t get upgrades. They share the agony of those whose flights have been delayed by a whole hour or who didn’t get a choice of main course. Ultimately, though, when it comes to thornier issues all they really have the power to do is tell people they aren’t able to help them with specifics and that Customer Relations are terribly busy at the moment. All they can do is send email to yourselves asking them to respond to individual cases. It must be incredibly frustrating for them to have to act as a punching bag for disgruntled customers with what seems like no power or authority to do what’s necessary to make the punches stop.
The problem with having a communications infrastructure mostly dedicated to telling people how busy you are rather than helping them actually get their problems solved is that “we’re terribly busy” is actually a lousy excuse for inaction, particularly in cases which involve actual, you know, criminal action and police reports and things.
“We’re terribly busy” isn’t actually an explanation or an excuse for inaction at all. It’s just corporate whining. Look, I’m very busy too. My wife’s very busy. We both work full-time. Even our daughter is very busy (mostly doing horrific things to the population of my LEGO Tower of Orthanc. I think Gríma Wormtongue is scarred for life). Luke Skywalker was very busy but he still had to do his chores rather than heading into Tosche Station to pick up some power converters (Uncle Owen was kind of a hardass there, probably to make us feel less bad when Imperial Stormtroopers shot him and then set him on fire. At least, I hope they shot him first.) I’m sure your staff are indeed terribly busy too, but that doesn’t excuse you as a corporate body from doing your job when it comes to customer communications. If your customer relations team is understaffed, overworked and too busy to respond to even routine issues, you need to address that. Hire more people. Pay more people overtime to work over the holiday season rather than keeping things going with a skeleton staff and running up a huge backlog for when you get back. Don’t just tell people that you’re very busy without further qualification and expect them to nod along and accept that. It’s pretty rude to send your customers the message that your time is more important than ours, particularly when it comes to addressing an issue which is very, very much your fault and for which you bear responsibility (not to mention, as far as I can tell, fiscal liability under the Montreal Convention).
Anyway — to recap, delayed then stolen bag, distraught five-year-old, bag in your custody at the time, radio silence, would like some reasons and an explanation and maybe even an apology etc etc. Still looking forward to hearing from you. I live in hope.
Cheers,
Mike
PS. Did you know my daughter discovered her first wobbly tooth while waiting to board LH445 back home from Atlanta? She was so excited that even the gate agent got invited to feel her wobbly tooth. Cute, huh?
