REGISTERING CUSTOMER COMPLAINTS ONLINE
by Ed Colet

In today's column, I look at how the use of email and online forms have made it easier for customers to register complaints pertaining to the airline industry. In contrast to the older process of writing and mailing complaint letters, the industry is slowly adopting a newer approach that utilizes email and online forms. Relatively speaking, email and online forms are far from an advanced technology, but their introduction has some interesting far-reaching consequences about our views of customer satisfaction.

The Business Travel section of the April 18 2000 issue of USA Today lists several Websites that are available for customers to register complaints relevant to the air travel industry. One of them is the Department of Transportation's (DOT) Web site. The DOT publishes a monthly report card on airlines services based in part on the number of customer complaints that are received. In 1998 the DOT started accepting email complaints about the airline industry. Another government site, the Inspector General's office also has a Web site that can accept travel related complaints. The government uses this Web site to investigate and audit airline overbooking sales practices. According to the article, there is a rapidly growing rate of customer complaints. When the site went live in 1998 there were just 626 emailed complaints about airline service that year. A year later, there were 5650, and at this year's pace there may be over 6600 complaints. In addition to the government site, some airlines are now collecting customer complaints through their own Web sites. The newspaper reports that Delta wanted to listen to their passengers and recognized that their policy decision of making it easier for customers to complain would result in more complaints. (It is also possible that in doing so, customers are less likely to complain to the DOT, and as such their complaints do not become part of the government's statistics about the airline's service). Third party Web sites are also available for submitting complaints. Some of these sites provide customer advice, provide airline contact information, and forward complaints onto the airlines and/or the DOT. All of these sites are also seeing rapid growth in the volume of emailed complaints.

The question is can we accurately conclude that airline service is worsening? And in a larger context, what do these data and the process of collecting this data say about customer satisfaction with air travel? The data undoubtedly show an increasing number of complaints from customers about air travel. But this is obviously due in part because the "data collection process" has changed. It is easier to register a complaint by firing off an email and submitting an online form rather than composing a letter, putting a stamp on it and dropping it off a the post office. As such it is no surprise that the number of complaints have increased. But this does not mean that air travel services are worse than before.

Sophisticated statistical models to adjust for this are necessary in order for comparisons with prior years to be meaningful. In this new approach of collecting complaints online, data mining technology could be especially useful. Are customer complaints sent directly to the DOT of a more severe nature than complaints sent directly to the airline or to a third-party site? (i.e. customers complain to the government after failing to have problems resolved by the airlines).

Responding to email is expensive (Delta apparently uses 650 employees to do this), and some airlines decided that a staff to respond to emails (but will respond to letters) isn't worth the expense. How does the lack of a response affect a customer's satisfaction? -- it can't be positive. For third party sites that merely forward customer complaints to the airlines-how does the fact that the customer doesn't get action from the Web site where they submitted the complaint affect customer satisfaction? Perhaps these sites that forward complaints to the airlines could process and analyze the data and forward data mining results to the airlines as well as the complaints.

It should go without saying the customer satisfaction is important.

Currently, the use of technology to make it easier for a customer to register a complaint does not complete the cycle of resolving the complaint. On the basis of the customer complaints sent to government sites, the government may be able to force the airline industry to change an unfair practice-but this can take months or years and does little for the individual customer's complaint. Sponsor sites that merely forward information on also do little to resolve the customer's issue. Airline sites that fail to commit the necessary costs to addressing customer complaints will also result in unhappy customers with unresolved issues. So, to collect the data is one thing-to be able to act upon it and resolve the issues is the way to ensure customers are satisfied.

Ed Colet is the Acting Director of Research at Virtual Gold Inc., responsible for developing analytical methods for data mining and for investigating human factors and usability issues of business intelligence systems. At present, he is in the final stage of completing a doctoral dissertation in the Cognition and Perception program at New York University's Department of Psychology. Ed has also worked for IBM Research at the T.J. Watson Research Center. At IBM, Ed was a member of the group that developed Advanced Scout, the data mining application for NBA teams. His research interests focus on statistical methods and human factors.

For more information, see www.virtualgold.com.