Recently, my wife, Melinda, and I traveled to the West Coast to see our youngest son. We saw the sights in San Francisco and ventured down to Monterey and Carmel-by-the-Sea for hiking, history, architecture, art, food, music, sand and salt air, and, of course, a little people watching. The trip was just what we needed, especially with the new academic year at Drury about to start. The only hiccup in an otherwise perfect eight days and seven nights? A little customer service indifference that I still can’t let go.
The long and short of it, was that our West Coast flight to the Dallas layover was delayed and that was going to make our connection back to the Queen City of the Ozarks a little dicey. Sure enough, all our purposeful race-walking and strategic
understanding of the DFW Skylink put us within a 100-yard view of the gate door closing shut after boarding. So close, but so far; we’ve all been there. In fact a survey by Hopper Technology Solutions found that 89% of flyers worry about delays and cancellations. In 2025, 58 million air seats were disrupted, 8 million more than six years prior. A delay and a missed flight are now seemingly as commonplace as spring planting and fall harvest. Melinda deftly worked the app and got us rebooked for the late flight back to Springfield. But wait, there’s more.
There was another flight and we traversed the concourse yet again to see if we could get on stand-by. The answer from the otherwise phone-focused gate agent: Looks like some seats will be available since a number of folks had not yet checked in. We were told to stay nearby, and she would reassess after the booked passengers boarded. We did so, only to be informed — after we re-approached the gate when the last passenger boarded — that we had to make the switch to this flight on the app and that the gate agent was too busy and actually wasn’t allowed to do so “this close to departure.” Turns out we only had seconds to make the changes in the app and before we knew it, yet another gate door was closed with us on the wrong side of it. Some of this contradicted what she had told us minutes before; the rest about her backlog of work seemed a little fanciful given her renewed laser-focus on her phone.
A cursory Google search indicates others — just wanting to get home — have been told all the versions of the same excuses including “our airport is not allowed to do standby.” In the end, this was nothing really. Nobody was hurt. We made it home on the later flight. The sun came up the next day. But yet the whole encounter remains fresh in my head.
Here is my point: All we wanted was a little customer service. For certain sure, this gate agent and scads of others undoubtedly have so many stories of customer rudeness or unrealistic expectations. We have all seen the videos. And while we talk often where I work at Drury about setting a standard for the customer service of our students and each other, I know that there are times where we might not hit the mark. In the end, treating a person like a person, listening with empathy, and being a real problem solver is the expectation for us. When we don’t do so, we miss an opportunity. Every person associated with our travel logistics hit the mark except one, and yet that is the freshest and most vivid memory of getting home at the end of a magical week.
This past week at first year student move-in, so many employees and returning students descended on the arriving cars and trucks, and literally moved entire loads of new student items to their residence hall room in just a couple of minutes. The look of relief from new students and parents that we had mastered the uncertainty of where to park and how to get keys, luggage, refrigerators, and the rest of the stuff to the room is always one of wonder. But wait, there’s more. A little later that morning at a different part of campus, a family I had helped unload asked me how to get to a specific office on campus. I could have told them the name of the building, directed them to a digital map, or waved them in the general direction. In the back of my mind, however, was a gate agent at an airport. So I just said, “come with me, let’s go together.”
Jeff Frederick is president of Springfield's Drury University.
This article originally appeared on Springfield News-Leader: With customer service, just one can make a big impression | Opinion
