I was reading several Web sites and blogs this weekend looking for a topic for this post and an advertisement caught my eye. It was a banner ad at the top of Advocate.com for United Airlines. Maybe United has been advertising on other LGBT sites before recently, but I haven’t noticed it. From what I’ve seen, United hasn’t done much to reach our community lately, and I’ll be watching to see if these new Web ads signal the start of a more coordinated outreach program to our community.
United has been pretty inconsistent with their outreach, but that makes sense given the fact that their service has been inconsistent as well (as my partner Mark pointed out to me this weekend in reminding me of two different travel experiences we’ve had on United):
• We recently submitted a customer comment on the bad trip home we experienced on our most recent vacation. The email response we received referred to us as “colleagues” even though we had clearly and repeatedly used the term “partner” in both of the comments we submitted.
• Traveling home from Buenos Aires on a United flight several years ago, a savvy United customer service agent noticed our matching rings and told us we could check in to security together because we were family traveling together.
The obvious lesson here is that a consistent travel experience is key to customer loyalty. We’ve all blogged a lot about the need to reach out to our community as customers with more than just advertising. But companies in service industries such as travel and tourism have to do more than just reach out to us – they must ensure that all of their employees engage their customers with respect. It’s great that the United agent in Buenos Aires recognized us as partners, but United’s “Elite Customer" agents should also be able to read “partner” in a letter and respond in kind. It’s a simple thing, but it speaks volumes about the values of a company and its willingness to engage its customers.
Gay and lesbians are increasingly demanding consumers. We pay attention to how we are treated and we vote with our wallets. We expect to be treated with the same courtesy as other passengers – and that includes a basic acknowledgement of our relationships as well.
This may seem like a simple action to correct (and it is), but it’s clearly a lesson that many service providers still need to learn. Consistency and basic respect are key to long-term customer loyalty. Check out my post from late last month about the new hotel training program in Philadelphia that aims to address this challenge directly.
What else should companies consider in reaching out to gay and lesbian audiences? Come back tomorrow for a look at our “Top 10 List of Mistakes To Avoid When Targeting Gay and Lesbian Audiences.” And let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
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As a lover of all things communications, and as an identified gay man, I really enjoy the intersection this blog provides. The ONLY thing I can say critically is maybe we can include bisexuals and transgender individuals within the blog topics and identifications. For a group of people looking for “equality” and “to be treated the same” we need to act first within our community before expecting it from society as a whole.
Thank you again for the great reads….
Matthew, thanks for your comments and for visiting us. You make a good point about including bisexual and transgender issues in our posts. We’ve written about transgender issues a few times (check out some of Eddy’s posts for example), but we haven’t written much about bisexual issues. Part of the reason for that is that none of us is bi or trans so we don’t have as much of a frame of reference. But I recognize that there are other ways to engage on these issues and we’ll make more of an effort to do so. I hope you’ll keep reading and commenting. Happy Thanksgiving.