Customer Service Story – Jet Blue Airlines

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One very important ingredient for a great customer service story is an employee who does something for a customer, not because they had to, but simply because it felt like the best thing to do. Another key ingredient is a company that empowers employees and trust them to make decisions in the best interest of the brand.

This story by Mike Schoultz (founder of Digital Spark Marketing), is about an experience he had while flying with Jet Blue airlines. This story is particularly awesome because it shows how much empowering employees can impact on service quality.

“The story started a while back while I was sitting on the runway in Orlando as my homeward-bound Jet Blue flight was about to taxi toward takeoff.

Like just about every other flight that hadn’t already been cancelled that day on the Eastern seaboard, ours was a couple of hours late departing.

The lead flight attendant gets on the P.A. system and says something very close to:

“Ladies and Gentlemen, we know we’re late taking off, and even though it’s the weather and not something we caused, we’re going to compliment everybody (with) movies for this flight.

We know you’ve all had a long day and we want it to end with something nice and relaxing. And for those of you who were supposed to be on the Continental flight and ended up here, we don’t ever want you to go back”

The mood on the flight which could have been a rather dreary late evening affair took an immediate upswing.

People joked and smiled and made eye contact.  They were noticeably brighter and calmer as the flight progressed.  And I’m writing about the experience today and business travellers are reading about it.

What enabled this relatively small act of kindness and allowed it to become a major brand statement? Midflight, I went to the back of the plane and asked.

I wanted to know the policy that allowed a flight attendant to make such a call.

We’re allowed to make almost any decision, the flight attendant explained, as long as we can justify it by one of the airline’s five core values: Safety, Caring, Integrity, Fun or Passion.

If we can tie doing something back to one of these principles, the decision is going to be supported by the company”

No matter how wonderful and efficient a brand is in delivering it’s product or service offerings, at some point things are going to go (very) wrong. Sometimes it could be as a result of factors beyond the control of the business, such third-party partners, acts of God or tech failure.

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Your customers understand these things can happen, what they want to know is what you’re going to do about it and how you’re going to help them meet their goals despite the service failure. They want the issue fixed and taken care of by someone who cares, shows empathy and apologizes for all the inconvenience.

Kelechi Okeke
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