I’ve been travelling for a couple days, which was one day longer than it was supposed to be, so I missed a couple of posts but I did get to experience an appalling inability to meet basic customer requirements that sounds like an ongoing system failure.

I’m talking about Delta Airlines. I was scheduled to fly back from Lexington, Kentucky, on Monday night at 7:30. I heard an announcement that a flight from Atlanta to Lexington had been delayed so I checked with the Delta rep at the gate to see if that was my airplane. It wasn’t. I joked about how lucky I was to get a plane coming from Detroit. She said the flights from Atlanta and Detroit seemed to alternate having trouble.

As take-off time approached, we were told that the plane’s engine wouldn’t start and a mechanic had been called. Twenty minutes later he showed up. About 45 minutes later we were told the plane was ready to go and we trudged out to the last plane leaving Lexington that night.

Once everyone was settled and the door closed, we waited and waited and waited for the engines to start and cheered when they finally kicked in. We taxied for take-off and then we taxied some more. Lexington is a small airport so if you taxi for ten minutes, you know something is wrong and, sure enough, we found ourselves back at the gate. The pilot told us the crew had reached its time limit and couldn’t continue. Did I mention this was the last plane out of Lexington?

So we stood in line for a half-hour to get rebooked the next morning and get hotel vouchers. The hotel shuttle driver joked about how often he picks up Delta fliers that time of night. The hotel clerks joked about Delta being its best customer. We who could not get home were not amused.

Flying back Tuesday morning, I sat next to a woman who flies Delta regularly from Atlanta to Minneapolis and she said when she gets to the company she’s working with, the people always ask for her travel horror stories. One time the plane flew with the landing gear down because they feared that if they retracted it, it would stay retracted. She had lots of stories.

I want to add that every Delta employee I interacted with was polite and helpful. This is not a people problem. It’s a system failure. The system for maintaining airplanes and scheduling them and meeting the schedules isn’t working. It sounds like it hasn’t been working for awhile. System failures are management’s problem. Delta has a serious leadership problem.

Customers beware.

To read about excellent customer service, click on these articles:

• Stakeholder Mapping
• Do You Trust Your Customers
• Walk in Your Customer’s Body Armor
• 9 Ways to Get Closer to Customers
• Bottom-Line Value of Customer Engagement

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