“Good Night, Sweetie”: Now a Terrorist Transmission?
In yet another sign that exactly one airline is completely out of touch with customer-reality, the Twitterverse popped up a story today about media consultant John Battelle, who was recently stopped, on a wifi-equipped aircraft flying between New York and San Francisco, from using video chat to say “good night” to his wife and daughters.
Which airline is it? Here are some clues:
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“United Breaks Guitars,” Song 3: Rhapsody in Bluegrass
As promised, Dave Carroll has released the third and final song of his United Breaks Guitars trilogy. In a special webcast event that happened live last night (recorded & available here; things gets started at about 04:30), Dave introduced the last video and spent another 45 minutes or so telling a more complete, behind-the-scenes story of both his broken Taylor guitar and United Airlines’ profoundly broken customer service organization.
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Voice of the Customer: Newsweek Blog Scopes Out Readers on Best, Worst Airlines
With this post, I begin a two-part mashup in order to make some points about leadership, employee relations, and service culture within the airline industry. I’ve touched upon this before, but my take on it this time introduces some new material; i.e., the observations of customers of two airlines (Southwest and United) in a recent Newsweek blog piece. This is part 1; let’s get started:
Last week, Newsweek’s Budget Travel blog invited its readers to weigh in with their perceptions of who the best and and worst airlines in the industry are. Have a look; there’s nothing scientific about the responses of course, but I thought it might be fun to quantify and summarize the results a bit, in a little “back-of-the-envelope” analysis that turned out to be pretty interesting.
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Forbes.com: Three Lessons for United
From the China side of the world, Shaun Rein (a freelancer for Forbes) has a pretty good take on the lessons to be learned from “United Breaks Guitars:”
“In today’s economy you can’t get by on decent prices or acceptable service. You have to stand out and win the hearts of your customers. To do that you have to go beyond satisfaction to true loyalty. You have to provide a compelling reason, beyond basic service and price, for consumers to choose you. And your organization must be unified in that mission. Otherwise, you may be the next to follow GM into Chapter 11.”
He has some noteworthy comments on the importance of employee morale as well.
Read the whole post here: United Airlines Shows How Not To Run Your Business.
