What Am I Looking For – Transformation or Transfiguration?

I don’t even know how to start today’s blog. I’m frustrated and angry and actually at an impasse and it’s all due to Expedia. After years of purchasing trips easily and efficiently, they seem to have undergone some kind of backwards transformation, in other words, not the good kind. In the past week, my wonderful husband and I have spent numerous hours – yes, hours – on the phone being transferred from person to person, being asked to hold for 20 minutes for a supervisor, being hung up on, being told they don’t have our information any more, rebooking over and over again, and then finding that the trip we thought we had booked was verified by the airline as not ever having been ticketed. If we hadn’t called them directly, we would have found that our flight wasn’t booked, and in fact, was going to go up the next day. Ah hah. Hence the delay. Keep the customer waiting and waiting until the prices go up, and all of a sudden you have $200 extra, just the amount you need to cover the travel insurance they purchased and for which you have to pay after they rebooked. Now, I don’t know about you, but when I reach out to a company, I want to feel welcomed, I want my name to be known, my worries assuaged, my t’s crossed and my head happy. Like the young man who met me only once at a meeting and then when he saw me at an event, immediately greeted me by my name. I was, for a moment, transfigured. I knew what customer service was supposed to be and it lived in that young man of only 16. Now why can’t a company that is older than 16 and rolling in both experience and dollars not make every customer feel as if they are being treated as well? And then they wonder why Amazon and Zappos are growing by leaps and bounds. Welcome to transformation, gentlemen. It’s called customer service