A Tale of Two Airline Cultures: 4 Steps to Handle a Service Snafu

Who hasn’t seen the video of a passenger being brutally dragged off an over-booked United Airlines flight on April 9th? The incident became a public relations disaster, and has adversely affected both United’s stock price and revenue and cost the CEO a promotion to chairman. In contrast, American Airlines had a similar customer service snafu last weekend regarding a mother of twin toddlers who tried to bring a stroller onto the airplane. The company moved swiftly to right the situation and avoid any negative consequences. 
 
The contrasting tales show how culture affects the bottom line.
 
The fact is, there will be customer service snafus, even in the best companies. Human beings work in companies, and human beings are imperfect and make mistakes from time to time. The proof of an organization’s culture is in the way it recovers from the service failure.  In the customer service business, it’s called “service recovery.”  How you recover from a service failure reflects the values and culture of the business.

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Let’s distill the lessons learned from these two tales.  Here’s what a company that values excellent customer service should do to recover from a service failure:
1.Quickly apologize specifically and sincerely.
American made a public apology as soon as the plane landed, and I assume they apologized to the mother.  In the video of the incident, we see a female flight attendant offering the sobbing mother some water.
2.Make the customer whole – or better.
American re-booked the whole family on another flight, giving them first class seats to their international destination.
3.Hold employees accountable to service standards and company values.
Immediately suspending the flight attendant was the right thing to do.  Perform an after-action review of all your hiring and training practices to identify a possible root cause of the mistake.  Communicate to and retrain employees as needed.
4.Publicize your service recovery actions.
Inform everyone affected of how you treated the aggrieved customer to right the wrong.  The audience to address is dependent on the situation: If you are a large public company or many people were involved, release a statement to the press.  If it was a smaller incident, be sure to let the people affected know.  You might even post a carefully worded review of the incident to your webpage, showing your company’s dedication to core values and what you do to enforce them.

What American Didn’t Do Well
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Why did American Airlines hire and retain a jerk in a customer-facing position?  The flight attendant involved in the incident seemed to be at best having a bad day, and at worst, someone who was looking for a fight.  Makes me wonder about AA’s hiring and performance evaluation processes.  Don’t they have a jerk detector in their hiring process?

Even though I’m a two-million mile frequent flyer on American Airline, I’m not a raving fan of the airline’s customer service.  It’s gotten better in recent years, but not anything to write an article about. Except now, in contrast to its rival’s awful customer service.  Something to think about.

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Kristin Robertson, CEO of Brio Leadership, is dedicated to increasing the number of employees who are excited to go to work on Monday mornings.  Services include executive coaching, leadership development classes and company culture consulting.  Don’t forget to get a copy of Kristin Robertson’s new book, Your Company Culture Ecosystem, available on Amazon.