Chicken or Beef?

The companies that I personally am most exposed to in the realm of customer service are the airlines.  My job puts me in an airplane seat almost every week and on most weeks 2 or 3 times a week.

Despite the ubiquity of travel people are still fascinated by it (something I find quite fascinating in and of itself…). Even the people who do it all the time love to talk and think about travel. In fact, it never ceases to amaze me how many people I know can spend hours talking about the most mundane minutiae of their trips. Somehow it ties right into something very basic in human experience – the wanderer fantasy – and never stops fascinating. Doesn’t matter how much time you actually spend on the road.

And me, with my special sensitivity to customer service, I have the privilege of being even more aware of the details of the airlines’ massive customer service machines.  I have, thus, come to both admire them AND see them as a metaphors for everything that’s good and everything that’s bad about operations and/vs. customer service today.

So today I am launching a bi-monthly column I will call “Chicken or Beef” (the boring choices of entrees most airlines used to give you when you flew… but now only sometimes offer on long-haul flights).

Through this column,  I will be sharing my pleasures and my pains; the good the bad and the ugly experiences that I have on the phone, on the internet, at the boarding gate and mostly – in the air, with a view towards the greater customer experience (r)evolution.

Last week I had two radically different experiences on two radically different airlines plus one perception change. Tuesday night I flew Continental to Berlin. Thursday night I flew Lufthansa to Tel Aviv. Both were overnight flights. Which airline had the best service? Tune in next posting to find out….

p.s. I want to acknowledge a little bit of  inspiration from the Wall Street Journal column ‘The Middle Seat”.  Thanks!