start me up!

Apologies and an Amtrak fiasco

Once, working for GreyPilgrim Inc., I decided to save myself a three-hour drive from Trenton to their location at NIST by taking the train. At the time (roughly 1997), I could get a round-trip Amtrak ride from Trenton to Union Station in Washington DC for $75. It costs a fair bit more now. So this is a full account of what happened that fateful day.

A tornado passed through Chester, PA, south of Philadelphia, and dropped a house on the track, so the train was delayed at 30th Street Station in Philly for almost three hours. (I found out later that the accident had occurred before I left Trenton -- if the Amtrak agent had told me, I could have saved a great deal of trouble.) So we were stopped on the track in a dark station, and as I looked around, I found my seat to be the only one in the car without a working overhead light. So I could not read. Plus, I was located in the front of the car nearest to the bar car, so I had to listen to passengers drinking and carrying on just a few feet away for the entire delay -- unable to read and with nothing to distract me from the noise.

I was to meet a connecting local train to Gaithersburg, MD, when I reached Union Station. By the time I finally got there, I was just in time to watch the last such train pull out, at midnight.

The stores and restaurants were all closed; the only thing in a vending machine I could get and still want to eat was PopTarts. So I got my PopTarts, and went to a large open area to sit, dead tired and starving, and eat them.

A security guard -- I could see him coming from several hundred feet away -- crossed the large open area to tell me the area was closed and I could not sit there. I told him I was tired and late and would be glad to move as soon as I ate my PopTarts. He told me I had to move now. That was the straw that broke the camel's back. I refused to get up, and after threatening me with bodily harm if I did not move (this assbutt was literally prepared to draw his gun), his supervisor finally came and cooled him off. By this time my GreyPilgrim partners had driven down from Gaithersburg and picked me up.

I wrote Amtrak about this incident, saying all my troubles could have been avoided if either (a) I was notified about the delay before I left Trenton or (b) my seat were provided with an overhead light. I told them I would never ride with them again. So later comes their apology -- and guess what comes with it! A free $75 round-trip ticket. (I never used it.)

This very behavior -- the concept of giving free service to disgruntled customers by way of an apology -- was discussed in this month's issue of Inc magazine (Wellner, A. "Making Amends") and was panned. I, at least, can think of six or seven other ways Amtrak could have addressed my grievance, and some of them would have worked. Typically, however, service businesses will tell you when you complain that they "value customer service" and will try to get rid of you the most painless way possible. $75 is the ticket's retail value, for instance, but for Amtrak it costs much less, as the seat probably goes unoccupied if they don't give it to a pissed-off ex-customer like me.

The same thing happened when AutoZone employees sexually harassed four of my students a couple of years ago. I went to the local AutoZone the next day to complain, and was told "we value customer service" and the woman chiefly offended was given a $10 gift card -- which did not work when she tried to use it later. AutoZone, like Amtrak, has never learned the art of apologizing, and as a result I will never do business with them again -- and I have made sure to tell hundreds of people why, as I now do you.

Wellner's argument is that companies lacking the skill to apologize are afraid that if they do, they will be assigned legal responsibility in the event that an angry customer sues. That's absolutely true -- if you don't know what you are doing. Wellner recommends a book called On Apology, by Aaron Lazare. That one will be on my reading list this summer. Amtrak and AutoZone oughta do the same.

Labels: office space

posted by Ron @ 1:48 PM