Companies spend millions on advertising and PR and lose all that money when they fail to sensitise their staff or train them to uphold their proclaimed values.
A recent update I posted on a social networking site brought home this fact strikingly. Stung by the unmistakable insolence and arrogance of the ground crew of Lufthansa in Frankfurt, I had vented by posting about it.
I rarely use this platform to post complaints. But boy, Lufthansa has a thing or two to learn about how to treat Indians with dignity meanwhile I wonder why I paid full Business Class fare to be treated this shabbily! Id said.
The responses came in almost immediately and to a man were empathetic. I had the same experience over a veg meal and never flew them again, posted one of the countrys leading designers. Similar thing happened to me at Frankfurt. My arriving flight was late and
I went to the counter. An attendant waited five minutes to tell me the flight had closed five minutes before. Never flew, never will fly Lufthansa again.
Went Business class on Lufthansa once in 2003 to Tokyo most uncomfortable flight ever have not used them since, said an NRI academic. An editor of a feisty tabloid noted hed stopped flying the airline many years ago because of its rudeness, whereas a fellow journalist recounted an old experience with the airline and said it had taken her years to recover from the ensuing trauma.
And yet, going by the triumphalist celebration of itself on the company website and in public communications, none of this seems to have registered with its management. Could it be that the strident and bitter response from similarly stung friends who comprised some of Indias most powerful voices had escaped notice altogether?
The disconnect between its own staggering self satisfaction and soft focus ads of crew rocking kids to sleep and coddling the old was in such sharp contrast with the feelings on the ground that it appears to be a parody of PR spin!
Travelling in the company of those we love is home in motion, is one such offering from the Lufthansa stable. Well, on a 20-day trip to North America, which included four flights with the airline, I could not have felt less loved. Less loved by the way the staff had condescended to me. Less loved when polite and very necessary requests for flight information were treated with churlishness and arrogance across the board.
But these were incidents that I had been prepared to turn a blind eye to after all they were acts of omission, not commission.
What finally broke the weary travellers back was when a flight manager turned on me the full force of his six-feet frame and addressed me with hostility, intimidation and unwarranted rudeness. Bewildered and stung by this final assault, the aggregate of all the other misdemeanours and hurts could be ignored no longer. I vented my experience thinking it would fall unremarked onto that great Wailing Wall that Facebook can be.
Hence my surprise when it found its echoes in so much empathetic bitterness and anger.
Malavika Sangghvi is a Mumbai-based writer
malavikasangghvi@hotmail.com
Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper
