Ghost flights and party poppers: Brands aren’t saying sorry properly when they own up to customers
Welcome to an end of week update from Unmade. Today: Qantas and Superhero have both been owning up to their customers about ripping them off in recent days, but you’d hardly know it from their communications.
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Great read. This edition really hit home with my experience week.
Bit of a whinge, but… Virgin cancelled my flight at 10am, replaced it with a 3pm flight, that was then delayed to 3:40pm. My whole arvo of meetings was wiped.
The best I got: “Apologies for the flight change”. And then an hour after the flight, an email survey “Tell us how we did!”.
Two points: I think automation is already introducing a new level of tone-deaf brand communications. What a world we live in.
And also, I ‘get’ that brand needs to present in all comms to customers. But so does common sense, and the idea that if I’ve been wronged by a company, I want personal attention and empathy, that shouldn’t be conveyed with an emoji.
It’s the one thing I tried to stop when I was doing PR for consumer brands, because as you’ve just shown, this form of brand-led auto-customer-comms looks so bad in media. The first thing customers will do is rage about it on social, and then its a stones throw away from being amplified and republished.