Last week, a video of a United Airlines staff member dragging a seated passenger out of his seat went viral. The airline company had an overbooked flight in which it needed four seats for its off-duty crew members. The passengers were asked to give up their seats, but none of them volunteered to do so.

United then randomly chose the four passengers whose seats were to be taken. David Dao was one of the four chosen passengers, and he refused to give up his seat. The company then used force to pull Dao up and drag him off the airplane. Dao was injured in the confrontation. The incident was so disturbing that it triggered outrage not only in the United States but all around the world. United’s mishandling of the incident raised questions and concerns regarding customer service in the airline industry.  

The incident and the public reaction to it sent an important message to companies: Mistreatment and low-quality customer service can no longer be hidden, and public anger can cause huge harm to the company and its value in stock. In the age of accessible smartphones and social media networks, it is so easy to record and film such incidents. It is also easy to spread them around because they are so newsworthy.

Recent incidents brought this issue back to light. Have companies stopped caring about their customers? Perhaps some companies began to prioritize accessibility and affordability over decent customer service. With the variety and huge number of options in every field and industry, good customer service is a necessity for any company to survive in the market. People often prefer doing business with one company and staying loyal to it, but if they do not have a strong reason to remain customers for that company, they will go to another.

Companies need to build trust with their customers, and that comes from taking care of the customers themselves. Moreover, most people would prefer good service over cheap price if they had to choose. It is true that people look for affordable service, but affordability does not compensate for poor quality. In this era, you can easily watch a video of a company mistreating its customers while you are thousands of miles away. It takes years to build a reputation, and a few seconds to ruin it. This fundamental and basic principle applies here: Companies spend millions of dollars on advertisements and publicity, and all that can be ruined via a free-of-charge Facebook video.

For all of these reasons, successful companies focus on building high-quality service for their customers. The United Airlines incident came as a reminder to all companies for the importance of customer service. And some already reacted to the incident by improving their standards.