How to Ruin Your Business

Cruising over to Clark Howard's site, I saw that he had a blurb about United Airlines and how they are totally revisiting their business model.

Namely, they're gonna stop offering their overseas customer service call center.

I can just imagine how the conversation went down in their boardroom.

Bigwig: Customers don't seem to get good service when the call with a compaint, but our email and snailmail models work pretty well.

Bigwig 2: Yes, obviously it is because people are too freaking stupid to understand Hindi. We should eliminate that call center.

Bigwig 3: That could save us dozens of dollars and allow us to keep our bonuses.

Bigwig 4: All in favor of doing away with any pretense that we actually care about our customers, please raise your hand! Okay, that's a unanimous vote. We axe the Indian call center, tell our customers to go screw themselves, and we'll somehow keep our market share in the face of rising fuel costs, increased traveler angst, and a worsening economic recession.

Great job, guys. Note to businesses: Your customers pay the bills. Treat them well. Telling them to go eff-off is not a path to success.
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