Did you just throw away my water bottles?

Justina Cruickshank
November 3, 2009
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Justina and Air Canada, Lifestyle newsThis week I was involved in an altercation. On a flight to Montreal with Air Canada, laden with two large empty water bottles, I politely asked the flight attendant, as they passed with the rubbish trolley, to refill them. Instead of taking them and trotting off to the back of the plane to service my request, the attendant threw the bottles in the bin. Now, any one who knows me, knows that water is my emotional crutch. Nobody messes with me and my water. I carry a bottle everywhere. If I don’t know where my next water fix is going to come from, I palpitate and break out in an anxious cold sweat. I hadn’t reached that point yet, but I was certainly narked.

“Did you just throw away my water bottles!” I called out, or perhaps screamed as my nerves began to race with uncertainty. He looked non-plussed as I chased after him, but then changed his mind and began to rant at me that he had the rubbish trolley so he wasn’t about to fill up my water whilst in the middle of performing an important task. WTF? Hold on, aren’t you an attendant, I thought. Definition being close to some one that attends to things. So that’s where my altercation began. Maybe an exaggeration, but the attitude of this attendant was ridiculous. His sole purpose was to prove that he was right and that I was wrong. I just kept wondering why couldn’t he just apologise and say he had made a mistake.

We only cooled off when a matron styled attendant came over with a new bottle of water for me. “See, problem solved”, she beamed. Well, no not really. That man had infuriated me and had left me all sweaty and anxious. I didn’t ask for much and I wanted to complain more loudly and more petulantly, but of course she didn’t want to hear my blubbering, so I had to entertain a fake ending to our dispute in my head as I reluctantly went back to my seat aware that they would tell stories of me later: the crazy English bird with an unhealthy obsession with water (I knew that I would have to ask for several more refills before the flight was out).

So, there I was getting all het up about a bottle of water. But strangely, we probably all have stories of moments when we lose our cool because we feel that the person dealing with us, the supposed customer service assistant isn’t providing us with any customer service at all.

In the gambling industry, this can be a problem. On that particular flight and any in fact, the airline already had my money. No matter how blue in the face angry I got, the flight attendant didn’t have to care. I was already on the plane, what was I going to do, jump out. I had no choice but to put up with it and maybe swear to never fly with them again…. But for gambling sites, it’s not so easy. The customer can make a conscious decision to not actually become a customer in the first place.

A player registering for the first time is not a player until they have deposited real money. Oddly, lots of sites don’t make this distinction and even more oddly many don’t do anything about it. There are swarms of players hovering in a kind of virtual waiting room, waiting for the right trigger that tells them they should now become a customer. I can’t remember the number the sites I am Registered and Not Paid at. Some contact me with enticing offers to remind me that I registered, but most don’t. It’s an area that the industry could definitely work on. It’s a missed opportunity and should feature prominently in marketing strategies after the customer has signed up.

There are a lot of factors that stop a player from actually depositing from failed credit card attempts, to deciding to try another site instead, to their own timing issues (perhaps the kids are calling them) and they simply forget. I might review some of these in the future, but the main thing I wanted to highlight is that acquiring a player does not stop at the point of entry, it is a continual process. Think 1950s style wooing of a date – you don’t stop trying to win them over until you get the result. That no man’s land virtual waiting room is a moment in the courting period where you can trap them and make them fall in love with you.

As for my next flight, I have never flown South West Airlines in the States, but I certainly like their idea of putting a smile on their customers’ faces. They’ve remembered that each point of contact the brand has with the customer is an opportunity to win them all over again. And winning them all over again means positive word of mouth. Check it out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivjybzdXVmI

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Tags: Air Canada, Article, Montreal, Water
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