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Customer service in the air
Feb 21, 2007
Customer service is in the air.
JetBlue customers had a tough time last week. The airline cancelled many flights nationwide due to the ice storm and (more pertinently) some organizational growing pains - leaving CEO David Neeleman with a PR crisis and some very dissatisfied customers.
Neeleman deserves a lot of credit for coming clean - like no other airline, let alone bank, store, cable company, or other service provider I can think of - by e-mailing his customers, posting a video apology on YouTube, and setting new policies for better customer service. Read more in this Consumerist article.
(Incidentally, with uncanny timing the new Coalition for an Airline Passengers' Bill of Rights launched just a few weeks ago.)
Meanwhile, the New York Times Magazine recounts the story of an (American) Toyota exec about his first trip to Japan. Quoting From 0 to 60 to World Domination:
On that first trip, at a restaurant one evening, he tried a rich corn soup and asked the waitress for the recipe. She checked with the chef, who explained that there was no recipe; it had been handed down from his mother. The next morning, the waitress came to [his] hotel room: she had found a cookbook with a recipe for the soup.
Now that shows a commitment to the customer, much like Danny Meyer's definition of hospitality, described here.
(More on Toyota, by the way, in The ‘Toyota Way’ Is Translated for a New Generation of Foreign Managers, also from the NYT.)
JetBlue may not deliver the recipe to your hotel room, but what other company would write this in an e-mail to all its customers?
Words cannot express how truly sorry we are for the anxiety, frustration and inconvenience that we caused. This is especially saddening because JetBlue was founded on the promise of bringing humanity back to air travel and making the experience of flying happier and easier for everyone who chooses to fly with us. We know we failed to deliver on this promise last week.
This is what it means to be committed to the customer experience.
- - -
See also:
- my column on Danny Meyer, restaurateur, a master of creating good customer experiences.
- Customer service is not customer experience
JetBlue has lost the thread. They've promised to give you credit vouchers at various amounts for various delays -- $25 for two hours, $50 for four hours, and so on.
Who cares?
What about a promise that if they wait on the runway for more than an hour they'll turn around, take you back to the gate, let you off, and buy you a ticket on another airline? Heck, even being taken back to the gate would be enough.
Frankly, I'm somewhat baffled that it had to come to this point. Since it did, I think it should **go without saying** that the company offers an apology to its customers. I don't think Neelman should get any credit for that!
From what I can gather, more than having to wait for hours on the airplane or in the airport (which would be bad enough), it was having to do so without being given any information or updates about the situation over a quite lengthy, extended period of time. It is not as if airport and flight delays originated with this particular weather incident. They are an inherent problem for the industry in general, and one that has been reported on for years.
It seems to me that if Neelman was really doing his job and was walking the walk of customer commitment instead of just talking it, some sort of contingency plan for these types of situations would already be in place, since delays are extremely likely to occur with the potential to become acute very quickly.