Perhaps the world’s worse Airline Rewards program

Le Bris' flying machine

When it comes to flying commercial I love United Airlines, in my opinion they have the best loyalty program in the airline industry. What they do is offer you benefits related to using their product. This concept is not new and the benefit to their company is clear. Having customers that will talk positively about your product or services and of course actually buy those products is of course the goal.  Having been in in the software and services industry myself for over twenty years, I also know an unfocused upon fact; not everyone will tell you when they are unhappy with your product.

For over a decade I have also looked deeply at the accessibility question: Why do so many companies seem to not care about building accessible products or marketing materials? On a recent trip to Bogota, Colombia, to discuss worldwide accessibility efforts, I was hit by a serious and I think irrefutable fact. Accessibility is being sold by most companies, in the form of a customer loyalty program, let us compare.

First, an airline says if you “get to gold” you will have the benefit of extra legroom and your first bag free or that you will always get your first choice meal in business class if you reach the highest level of their frequent flyer program. On the other hand if you do not do so, you can still buy extra legroom and you may or may not have to pay for a bag and you might not get your meal of choice. In general they are saying if you achieve a certain level of status you pay less and enjoy more. The take away here is perhaps a soft threat to frequent flyers stating they can avoid all the fees and have all the benefits if they just fly one airline.

Next, a company that specializes in Accessibility solutions has the same twist. They say if you do not build accessible you may get sued or be subject to some other action. In the early days of Accessibility consulting I remember a company that used to threaten to sue companies in order to gain their business. Regardless of the hard threats you were told that besides not getting sued accessibility was the right thing to do.  So, the sales pitch in this case is basically the same except one focuses on positive and one focuses on negative. We should all remember sales 101, negative is not the best way to sell.

In addition to this there is the problem of product definition. The plane and in-flight services you receive as a frequent flyer are clearly defined while with Accessibility the sales pitch starts with a more subtle innuendo to the customer” you have no idea what needs to be done so you need to pay me as an expert.” This is perhaps the most troubling. Highly educated engineers are being told that accessibility is so complex that even if they buy the product they will need to buy the services perhaps for an eternity, as accessibility is just too complex for the everyday person to grasp and there are no standards.  When confronted with the no standards question the accessibility provider says it is just too complex.  We can find clear instructions online and standards for so many things on the web but not for accessibility. Is accessibility intentionally ambiguous?

In the end if the customer is not satisfied with a loyalty program they simply fly with a different carrier or ignore all loyalty programs and just fly with the cheapest ticket.  When it comes to accessibility they just do not “fly”. This fact is heartbreaking as it hurts so many people and we need to identify who is to blame. If we go with the high road here we blame the process and not the people.  The overall rejection of building a standard and going with ambiguous guidelines is the reason in my opinion. Could you imagine saying to a builder of a handicap ramps that it can be done any number of ways and the only way to do it properly is to hire an expert or do you expect that your builder can read and understand the requirements and guidelines, I assume you would want the latter? Could you imagine planning and designing a restaurant with a seating area of 130 in the new building and not having anyone tell you how many wheelchair locations are required? Instead you are told that you will need to hire and keep a consultant on a yearly retainer to ensure accessibility of your restaurant, as this may change at any moment, or again do you expect an unambiguous guideline. As a community we need to push for information that is unambiguous as related to education and guidelines.  For software and web accessibility to go further it needs to steal a page from the construction industry and make its guidelines or a new standard is unambiguous by design. This needs to be done even if a few companies are not contemplated or covered because of changing technology and or bleeding edge technology.

The cold hard truth is that we are not educating well on accessibility because the guidelines are not unambiguous. Our community tends to treat anecdotal evidence as research proofs and this is not a good or productive thing. Learning from the airlines and their sales tactics is something we should do as a community and the first thing we need to do is look at southwest. Bags fly free here, and while they may shout at other airlines you never hear them focus on a competitor by name. The reason is this makes it a positive sale. However, in accessibility there is much infighting, competitors slander other competitors or products, and there is more than the occasional shake down if you want some press for your product and this is bad. Why is it bad you may ask? The answer is we are not selling free airline bags and we don’t even live up to the negative sale that is offered. 

I always believe it is best to focus on what you do well rather than to criticize a competitor. By highlighting your strengths and the features of your solutions, you draw attention to your competitor’s weaknesses, without being negative. One approach I have I really like for is to create a chart of features and capabilities listing the best things that you do with a column for each of your products and one left blank.  When a customer asks you how your products or services compare-provide them with the chart of what you do and the space for them to compare to the competitors. By doing this you are educating your prospect and being positive.

Perhaps the most important thing is rewards. In accessibility, if we are being positive, we tell people what good things they can achieve, how if they do not do this they are losing customers because they are not focusing of accessibility, and then we show them the disability statistics.  Impressive until they ask if we do something for deaf people and we have to look at them and say we have no solution but we include them in the numbers. If we assume our customer is smart, they look at these numbers and see that it includes a plethora of disabilities but your product or service does not address these issues. Because of this the accessibility company looks like a liar that plays fast and loose with numbers and the customer walks away.

In addition there is the paradox of the sales statement in this case:

1. Tell the customer that they need to support the minority because of the size of their disposable income
2. Then tell the customer that your focus is on serving people with disabilities, as it is the right thing and there is money to be made in doing the right thing
3. You then tell your customer that you have no captioning solutions but isn’t it the right thing and did you not leave a lot of disposable income on the table.

Given all of this it seems that accessibility vendors that use the “subscribe to this belief” and “get this reward” do not practice what they preach in their sales arguments. In fact they may be the worse Airline Rewards Program available, or at least in that model. In my next post I will give my thoughts on what needs to change to get wider acceptance of products to the market using techniques not laced with fear, uncertainty, doubt and other threats. I will also cover how it is good to make money at it and why we need NGO’s to be formed to complete this task.

Ciao,

Rob