Customer Service Sky Handling Partners Style
June 20, 2007
Damien flew on SAS and his bags took a different route. He blogged his frustrating experience of dealing with Sky Handling Partners who were less than courteous in their dealings with him check out the original post here. But this morning’s developments are truly scary
This morning I noticed someone snooping around my website after coming to the site with the search “sky handling partners”.
Just before lunch I started getting email confirmations from dating sites, including gay ones saying my account for their site has now been created. Seems someone was creating profiles saying I was looking to meet men and had rather interesting profile descriptions. One of the emails disclosed the IP address where the person submitted the details from:
62.77.175.251
A quick reverse DNS shows that the IP allocation of this eircom customer is:
inetnum: 62.77.175.248 – 62.77.175.255
netname: CITYJETHLING
descr: City Jet Handling Dublin.
City Jet Handling is the former name of Sky Handling Partners.
Apart from the utter stupidity of doing such a thing from a company website – the fact that anyone would respond to a legitimate complaint about shoddy customer service by using a person’s personal data and their sexual orientation to plan revenge is simply beyond belief. Omani asks a question over at his blog
Imagine you’re an employee of a big company. Your boss comes to you and asks you to do this. What would you do?
Which assumes that this is someone low down in the food chain but I wonder, I really wonder about this. Supposing this act was undertaken by someone further up the food chain? What is to be done in this case.
Sky Handling Partners picked the wrong person to mess with (Damien’s original post is number 2 in a Google search for them) – and a cursory search on Google would have revealed that Mr Mulley wouldn’t take this lying down – but what if you are not as connected? and what if you don’t have an online presence as a way of highlighting something like this? If this teaches us anything it’s the importance of knowing what your digital footprint looks like even if you don’t think you have one. Just because you don’t blog or hang out on various web forums doesn’t mean you aren’t out there by default or through the actions of someone else.
I will watch Damien’s progress with interest and more pertinently, the response from Sky Handling Partners…As an aside, I’m flying with SAS Airlines on Monday next…if my bags don’t arrive on the same flight as me I may just have to brandish my blogging credentials as well. Good luck with this one Damien.
You are absolutely right Annette. Imagine it was the director of marketing who was spoken to by the CEO:
“Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest (Damien Mulley) ”
In my comment on Damien’s blog, I said I thought this was surely authorised by someone in a high position in the company. No junior person would have dared take such a risk with their job.
That’s truly scary, Annette. What an abuse of information. We’re truly in the age of Big Brother now. I look forward to seeing Damien whup their asses. At the very least, an article in a newspaper should prove suitably embarassing for them.
Tracy Culleton
Annette,
We have to look for the positives in all of this. The company involved, Sky Handling Partners, are about to learn two invaluable lessons
[1] How not to handle a customer complaint.
[2] The awesome power of word-of-mouth.
This saga has the potential to become a classic case study in the customer satisfaction literature.
Frank Fullard
I think this will just join the many other instances of poor customer relations but what will be more interesting is whether Sky Handling Partners decide to deal with it in public. According to Damien he has received a solicitor’s letter asking him to remove the posts (which is even more bizarre) which he won’t do and there is some indication that SHP have contacted the police themselves. It’ll be fascinating to see what happens with this one.
Hi Annette
Just read the post – this is very scary! it reminds me of a book ‘the lost honour of Katharina Blum’ by Heinrich Boll, written way before The Matrix series, but the idea that others can wilfully set out to damage someone’s character is incredible.
Look forward to updates.
Hi Annemarie – yes the whole issue of people deliberately setting out to damage is a serious one – more reasons I guess why people in business need to blogging if for no other reason than to have a place to refute such attacks!