Incredible the amount of work Qantas put in to try to screw such a small amount of money out of a customer who had been seriously stuffed around by their failure to provide a service. A true reflection of their value for customers.
My thoughts too. Airlines however are not unfortunately alone in this behaviour. Almost all large companies do this now. They have all adopted the classic insurance company DDD policy. Deny, Defend, Delay as their SOP to any and all customer complaints. They will happily spend $100 to save $10. I think it's about not creating a precedent, not accepting any responsibility and a little bit of the full-time company lawyers on monthly retainer justifying their own existence and jobs.
In the age of social media, they know via means such as this one that their actions are going to be much more widely seen today than they ever were in the past and hence they don't want it to become widely known they're a push-over who caves at the first sign of a complaint being lodged. Otherwise, they reason, there is the risk of creating an avalanche of free money payouts from spurious claims left right and centre. This is why they will happily spend the time and money far excess of the value of the claim to defend it.
The classic line that's always included "as a gesture of goodwill" is legal council-speak for we accept no responsibility and don't acknowledge any wrong-doing on our behalf, but we'll pay you out anyway. This again is designed to prevent any precedents and the leaving of any cracks open for like-claims to follow up afterwards.
Their third defence is the most annoying and frustrating for me which is the delay tactic, designed to wear you down and make you give up through loss of fortitude. Hiding e-mail addresses, denying receipt of correspondence, not replying, constant staff changes so you never speak to the same customer service rep twice, having no working correspondence reference system so that each enquiry has to start again from first contact each time. Claiming forms and receipts and correspondence hasn't been submitted in a format they can open/read, demanding forms be submitted via their uploading portal system that doesn't actually exist, redirections to non-working and non-existant departments for complaint resolution etc. These are all the tactics employed to delay any resolution of the problem until the complainant either goes away of their own accord or it extends the dispute out to beyond the time limit where their self-imposed rules mean they will no longer look into it.
Just in this case about $135 I had to submit their completed claim form for payment back to them a total of four times and in doing so they even wanted to argue about the scanned signature on it, the format version of the PDF document it had been saved in and the fact I had added extra information on the form that wasn't required or contained completely within the perimeter of the box. All issues that might prevent or delay the form being processed apparently. Just more delaying tactics. Even then, I still get a response saying it's going to take them 10 working days to process an EFT. Something I can manage to do several of each day in a matter of a few minutes.
"A gesture of goodwill" ?
Yep. This phrase is quickly becoming the most commonly heard line in customer/business relations these days. Every single dispute of any nature whatsoever is always resolved with the caveat "as a gesture of goodwill". It's used so often and so flippantly and with such disregard that it's virtually lost all meaning. It's the company legal council way of saying the judges decision is final and no further correspondence will be entered into… oh and by the way, we weren't at fault either.
It's precedent they are worried about. Look at a business like McDonald's, they will have a go at anyone even if they know they will loose. They don't want the floodgates open.
If you think it's only Qantas you are being a bit naive.
Exactly. It's definitely not just airlines. It's every large corporation doing this now. I've had the same arguments with banks, credit card providers, insurance companies and even government utility providers like Water Corporation, electricity retailers, DMV, local councils… they're all infected with the same disease these days and the more things get automated and pushed online with fewer and fewer real human staff to deal with them, the worse it's going to get. Companies simply don't want to deal with customers. They want their money, but nothing else. Customers are a pain in the ar5e they simply don't want and anything they can do to discourage the customer from contacting them about anything after the money has been handed over is a good thing to them.
I believe this is a large reason why there is often physical violence when the human parties actually come together in person these days and why disputes escalate so quickly. By the time human face to face contact is eventually established, the complainant has already been riled up to such a level of frustration and annoyance over many months arguing with computers and faceless drone employees with no vested interest in actually finding a solution, they're already right on the verge of pulling out a gun and shooting someone. That's when you see what appears to be the totally irrational and OTT reaction to a dispute over what amounts to a truly trivial amount of money in the greater scheme of things. If the company involved had simply resolved the dispute in the first instance with a calm face to face human exchange involving some empathy and understanding, then no-one would have got shot and the company would have gained a lot of positive PR. Sadly though, this is never the path taken these days because people are too expensive to employ and computers don't yet do empathy or understanding. They do rules.
