GreenEye Wire

With Youtube, it is imperative you treat your customers right.

We’ve all heard about luggage getting lost or destroyed on airlines, so that’s really nothing new. So a song about a guy’s $3500 guitar getting broken really isn’t that notable.

What is notable is how musician Dave Carroll dealt with it. He didn’t just tell a few friends he got a runaround from United Airlines, he wrote a funny song about it and put it on Youtube. And, there are 2 more in the works. (The entire ‘United Breaks Guitars’ story of what happened.)

It’s also worth it to note that Youtube gets over 100 million page views a day. Way to go United.

What’s even more interesting to note is that this could have gone the other way. If United gave great customer service and took care of the guy’s claim, they might have a wonderful PR campaign out of this. Instead of writing a song about how he got screwed, he might have written a song about how he was taken care of. Free positive advertising…

I’m not sure if United can cover this up. It seems like it would take a lot of money and effort. Sure, maybe if they make good with the guy and pay to replace the guitar, although at this point, it might be “too little, too late”.

Maybe they could work on claim policies to ensure that people don’t get a runaround like this again. But it seems they’d have to put on a good sized advertising campaign to tell people of that fact.

It’ll be interesting to see what, if anything, United does to respond to this.