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One Month On: What We Learned From the United Airlines CX Nightmare

Zarina de Ruiter | 05/24/2017

It’s been a month since a United passenger was forcefully removed from a flight resulting in a PR disaster, what can companies do to prevent a similar CX headache?

Whether you work in the travel and hospitality industry or not, you can’t have missed the United Airlines customer experience (CX) story making headlines last month. They required additional spaces on a flight for employees, and when no customers volunteered to give up their seats they forcefully removed a passenger against his wishes – with disastrous results.

The lack of customer service in this instance and seeming lack of empathy afterwards in public comments, rubbed the public the wrong way. What could United have done differently? And what can they – and any other company caught up in a CX nightmare – do to change a negative customer sentiment around?

We asked our CX experts from Thomas Cook, Amtrak, and more.

Do you have any advice to add to that already shared by our expert panel? Do leave it in the comments below!

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