Death By Upgrade

Every time I hear “upgrade” or “update” attached to anything I like…I shudder. All too often it means I will receive poorer service, I will no longer have access to the features I like, and I’ll have to spend time and money to fix problems it’s caused.

I saw one of the dreaded words recently when I received an email from American Airlines with the scary subject line, “We’re making changes to the AAdvantage program.” Reading on I discovered a link to “AAdvantage program updates.”

I now have pages and pages and pages of complex and often incomprehensible information on the wonderful things they’re doing to upgrade their frequent flyer program…all designed to make my experience better!

I am dubious, to say the least, about this claim.

I have nothing against new ideas, new products, making things better…I love my iPhone Gargantuan…but I do have problems with the seeming insatiable need of companies to continually tinker with things that are already working quite well.  Companies are always finding solutions for things that aren’t problems. As a result, they’re making their customers’ lives miserable…including mine.

Change for change’s sake is a bad idea.

And using glowing terms when sharing your unnecessary and even detrimental changes with your customers is irritating and insulting.

Irritating and insulting your customers is also a bad idea.

I am at the highest level of American Airline’s frequent flyer program: Executive Platinum. Have been for some years. I’m a body aching million miler. Apparently after showering me with gratitude over the years because they value me, American has decided they really don’t like me all that much.

How do I know? Because once I weeded through the reams of information about their “improvements” I saw that they changed the program in such a way that it discounts how much you fly in favor of how much you spend. It’s those who purchase the most expensive tickets who are now valued.

I can imagine the meeting during which they decided to try and dupe all of us getting the raw end of the deal…which is most of us. “They’re really not all that bright so we’ll tell them what we’re doing is wonderful and a huge improvement. Let’s fill up pages with information that no one can understand and throw in obscure airline codes to really confuse them. We’ll hide the things we’re taking away in little type at the end—no one ever reads that.”

When it comes to making changes in your product or service, honesty and openness is the best policy. Explain fully and clearly what it is you’re doing and treat us like intelligent people who can understand why you have to do something that we’d rather you didn’t do. Is it a change you’re making simply because it’s likely to lead to the highest profits for your shareholders and big raises for senior management? Or, is it a genuine fix that addresses a real problem and improves the customer experience?

The latter is an UPGRADE, the former is not.