What happens at the point of contact with the customer, especially for a service provider, can have a significant influence on the firm’s performance, and certainly its reputation in the short run. This is especially so in the era of rapid communication and influence through social media like Twitter or Facebook. And since images shape opinions ever so strongly, one badly handled customer can more than undo all the millions spent on advertising and the tens of millions paid to the CEO.

United Airlines spends a lot of effort training its flight attendants on customer service. They even undertake a quarterly survey of their flight attendants to find out what makes their customers tick. But perhaps because they hand out bonuses to ensure on-time arrival and quick turnaround of the aircraft, employees may overlook niceties in how they treat their customers.

What package of training, compensation, unstated values that the employees absorb and other factors go to create the culture of an organisation’s approach to customer service is very difficult to fathom. Otherwise, what would explain the crisis that United Airlines faced when its staff oversaw the bloodied dragging out of a passenger from the aircraft a few months ago, resulting in pictures circulating around the world?

And now, it is a similar moment of truth for Starbucks at another point of contact between the customer and the firm. Last month in Philadelphia, two customers in the store, who had not purchased anything and said they were waiting for a friend, wanted to use the bathroom but instead were asked to leave. Unsuccessful, the store manager then called the police who took them out in handcuffs even as the friend they were waiting for arrived and protested.

It is bad enough for something like this to happen in a store that wants more people to walk in for expensive coffee, enticing them with free Wi-Fi and comfortable chairs. It is worse when the manager is white and the customers are black, for then you wonder if it is race and not just bad customer relations. The company acknowledged that its store policy allowed the manager to call the police if unpaying customers refused to leave.

Would it have been a problem if they were all white or all black? Or if the manager was a man (it was a woman) and the customers were women (they were men)? Stores located in busy areas have a hard time discouraging the homeless from making it their home. Not all the police officers were white. If they were, and the Starbucks manager had been black, would the focus have shifted to the police from Starbucks?

Unfortunately, race tensions in the US are at a new high, coming after several cases of police brutality especially against coloured people around the country. Fortunately, Starbucks did not try to muddy the waters further by putting out a legal spokesperson to handle the outrage. Instead their CEO responded promptly, was suitably contrite and announced a half-day in May when all their stores will be closed and employees will receive training on anti-bias and race sensitivities.

The training may help prevent such incidents in the future and at least shows the public that the company is prepared to incur a significant cost and revenue loss trying to deal with the problem. But what is the problem? Individual bias, societal bias, bad company policies, or should we wait for the next viral video of a customer interaction?

The writer is a Professor at Suffolk University, Boston

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