Doing Words

VirginBlue shows exactly how NOT to email your customers

// November 14th, 2009 // Communication, Marketing, Writing

Wow, for a brand that I thought cared about its customer relationships, VirginBlue really messed up this week. Maybe Friday the 13th played a part and everybody wanted to squish the error in a hurry before the weekend began, but this episode was really worth thinking through a second time, even if it meant missing Friday night drinks at the VirginBlue watering hole.

Like unknown thousands of other VirginBlue customers, my wife, Boy8 and I all received an email from VirginBlue telling us that, even though we hadn’t yet earned enough points to qualify, the decision had been made to upgrade us all to ‘Gold’ — the top tier of the VirginBlue frequent flyer program.

The following morning, we all received an email telling us in a brief and casual manner that a mistake had been made, we weren’t getting the upgrade, and VirginBlue wished us their “warm regards.”

The effects of that email are still rippling through trade press, online media, Twitter and the blogosphere and will probably be in the weekend’s papers when I’ve had a shower and walked the dog to the shop.

Like most other customers who received the email, I feel like I’ve been treated shabbily by a brand that cared about its relationship with me. Unlike most other customers, I understand why the email made me feel that way, and what VirginBlue could have done differently to salvage the customer relationship it has enjoyed until now.

This will be hard for the IT department to understand, but it wasn’t so much that the error occurred, it was how VirginBlue handled the communication that has caused the crisis. The two emails couldn’t have been more inflammatory if they’d been deliberately written to offend. Allow me to break it down:

So some customers get a better deal than I do?

The first email made a big deal of how I’d been upgraded even though I hadn’t earned enough points. So now I know that even when the system is working perfectly, some customers get upgraded before they’ve earned enough points. That’s an unfairness in the business rules that should not have been communicated so widely, and when it was, should have been the primary focus of the communication. Something along the lines of, “we’ve reviewed our business rules in light of the system error and have revised our policy so that in future, no members will be discriminated against on their qualification for upgrade.”

The economics of rewards points

For me as a Red level member, being granted Gold status would bring significant benefits that I would value far higher than their likely cost to VirginBlue (that is, after all, the way points systems are designed to work.) To upgrade and then downgrade a customer — to reveal and then remove benefits of high personal value — is a big deal and it has a significant effect on your relationship with most customers affected.

VirginBlue (and anybody operating a loyalty program) must remember the true value of reward points is not their cost to the company but the way they make the customer feel.

Don’t be casual when you apologise — always over-do it

VirginBlue way underestimated the impact of the error to follow-up with a brief generic email beginning “Ooops!”. This was always going to end in bad publicity, but a better email could have softened the blow and salvaged the customer relationship.

The email should have been personal — from person to person, not from brand to person. It should have been written in the name of a VirginBlue senior executive with a signature and a photograph at the end of the email.

Next, the email should have detailed the approx. number of customers affected by the error, the cause of the error in layperson’s terms (not just “a system error”) and the steps taken to ensure it doesn’t happen again. Being too brief about it just gives the impression the company doesn’t take it seriously and doesn’t care if it happens again.

How to let them down more gently

Detailing the approx. number of customers affected helps segue into the most difficult — but most important — part of the email: explaining that it’s not possible to honour the upgrade promise.

When I received the second email, I was not one of thousands of affected customers, I felt like the only customer affected. It was only because I bothered to search for information online that I realised I wasn’t the only one affected. The email sent only said, “you do not qualify for that upgrade.”

The final element of a better email communication would have been to offer some small token gift in reparation. If VirginBlue values the customer relationship it has with me, it should show that it cares about the damage to that relationship by administering itself a penalty.

We’ve already talked about how points programs work because customers value rewards more than their cost to the company, so any small reward given at this point will earn VirginBlue more in customer relationship value than the bottom-line impact.

While offering affected customers a small token reward doesn’t add up to the benefits of Gold status, it does at least make the customer feel like VirginBlue cares enough to punish itself for the mistake. VirginBlue deliberately positions itself as the underdog in the Australian domestic aviation market and fosters an “us-against-the-establishment” relationship with its regular customers. That relationship only works if VirginBlue shows it values its customer relationships more than its competitors do.

By making such a dramatic error and then doing such a bad job of communicating it, VirginBlue starts to look much more like the establishment than the underdog.