Ah..revenge... a dish best served cold...
FF - you write as if this were a note placed in a drawer and gloated over in private. This is an open forum and read by many in the industry. I would suggest this is an excellent place to make a point like this!
As someone who has been involved in drafting and implementing CRM programmes in the past, I can say there are a few facts that are driven home as a basis for every system. One is that received complaints are always the tip of an iceberg. Another is that you should not educate a customer to follow your system, but rather make your system flexible enough to accommodate the customer. To try to do the former displays a lack of customer focus. It is exactly the customer who hasn't got the time, or refuses to use your chosen conduit for complaint (particularly if they are so pi##ed off) that you want to identify and address. If I have been severely annoyed by my service provider's system, do you really think I am more likely to spend more of my valuable time dealing with that system again, in effect doing their job for them, then sit back and wait for them to maybe listen, or maybe not, according to whim? No - I am going to walk and I am going to tell people about it. The final fact we should remember, is that a dissatisfied customer, while he may not tell the provider he is dissatisfied, he will surely tell his friends (and pprune!!!), which is exactly why service providers always try to empower the person at the point of delivery to resolve issues before they become problems.
These points seem to have escaped the attention of this Big Airline. And I always wondered what my colleagues in the industry meant, when they referred to "Bad Attitude"...