I think at the heart of it, they should make *every* customer satisfied. And that’s hard, but that’s how you win, isn’t it?

I dare guess that there are probably hundreds of so-called “complaint” videos popping up on YouTube and elsewhere every single week.

Some of them never see the light of day because aside from a few dozen views, they don’t manage to go viral.

Once in a while, you get videos like this United Breaks Guitar song, which is so compelling, it goes viral and gets the 2.3 million views. However, the average Joe that wants to complain about something will not have the musical talent to make this compelling content, and likely any crap video they do come up with will just wither away and never get to see mass distribution.

Now, I am also going to assume that a company of United’s size and complexity has literally thousands of issues to deal with from all fronts. Obviously every company says customer service is important to them, but when resources get scarce in this economy, and you need to prioritize, sometimes somethings just slip through the cracks – like in this case failing to address a customer’s the broken guitar.

If United needed to prioritize and can only address 9 out of 10 customer complaints, there is no consistent way that they can tell upfront which customer complaint they should ignore, since it will cause the “least” social media damage.

So could it be that this time they were just unlucky enough that the customer complaint that fell through the cracks for them just so happened to be a band which created a song which just so happened to go viral on their ass?

Then would a risk management consultant tell them in hindsight that this was a 0.1% chance event (I’m totally making the numbers up), and it should be handled the exact same way next time, since with finite resources you can’t always cater to every 0.1% event that may or may not happen?

Anyway, I have no conclusion. Just felt like rambling on a Sunday night.