Oh No! Not Southwest Airlines!

Customer Inter@ction Solutions, May 2008 by Sims, David

Those of us in the CRM world have long had a few superstars, and we use them the way English teachers use The Great Gatsby or Macbeth companies that you could always trot out to support any point you're trying to make on proper customer service, customer-centrism, CRM, Putting The Customer First, The Shocking, Little-Known Business Secret That Customers Don't Like Being Treated Poorly, or whatever terminology you choose.

Amazon.com is one ofthose companies. Enterprise Rent-A-Car shows up in quite a few CRM textbooks, as does department store Nordstrom, which earned itself a place in CRM lore simply for taking back four ores a customer wanted to return and reimbursing him. Nordstrom's doesn't sell tires. But by heaven they took them back

Gordon Bethune put Continental Airlines in the constellation. L.L. Bean, of course, has long been legendary for customer service. And there was Southwest Airlines. If you Googled "Southwest Airlines" and "bad customer service" you got that page saying maybe if you remove quote marks you'd get more - some, any - results.

Southwest patriarch Herb Kelleher was a CRM writer's godsend. He did everything we suggested companies do - and it worked. If we needed a Potemkin Village to show A Happy CRM Workers' Paradise, we took them to Southwest. Kelleher's understudy Colleen Barren said things like "Other airlines can't do what we do, it's too simple." Hey look - the flight attendants are wearing hot pants, serving wine coolers and laughing.

A little remembering of the passengers' names here, a dollop of turtle blood soup there, nuthin" fancy here at Southwest, we're jest plain folks tryin' to do the right thing and customers ate. It. Up. All it resulted in was a skein of profitable quarters unbroken back to the Wright Brothers. See? See? We CRM writers crowed. Do what we say, put the Customer At the Center of Your Business and you, too, can Dominate Your Industry!

People would go out of their way to fly Southwest. Family members would be told to move to a city serviced by Southwest if they expected visits. People would take Spring Break in Minneapolis instead of Ft. Lauderdale because "Southwest flies to Minneapolis." Somewhere out there, I know it, is a child named "Southwest."

Then this reporter dropped out of the CRM biz for a while, moved to the Mediterranean coast of Turkey and ran a coffee shop. Where we practiced good CRM, of course.

A couple years ago, I took a job writing about CRM again - it's like riding a bicycle or prison tattoos, you never forget - and assumed All Was Well with my pantheon of CRM saints. Hey Amazon.com was still as good as ever, why would anything else change?

Then I heard the rumbles. Faulty inspection reports. Unconfirmed sightings of a disgruntled passenger. Southwest spoken of in something less than reverent tones. I... okay, I ignored it. I didn't want to know. I avoided. I clinged. Hi, I'm Dave and I'm a willing ignorer of faults in my favorite companies.

But there was no avoiding The Wall Street Journal's March 8,2008 article entitled, "Southwest's Record Safety Penalty Strains Relations With Regulators" (www.tmcnet.com/1913.1), whose opening paragraph read "The government's proposed $10.2 million penalty against Southwest Airlines Co. for maintenance lapses has strained the carrier's relationship with regulators and threatens to hurt its image as a pioneer in efficient, passenger-focused operations."

Evidently, according to the Journal's information, Southwest knowingly flew 46 oldermodel Boeing 737s without performing mandatory structural inspections. The Federal Aviation Administration unleashed the dogs to go in, secure a beachhead, kick butt and take names. The troops stormed United first out of sheer habit before they rerouted, checking and double-checking their directions the way a pizza delivery guy would recheck an order for three large pepperoni and ham pizzas with extra cheese to a synagogue.

Now, this reporter doesn't pretend to be an airline flight safety expert. (I do pretend to be a 23-year old blonde named 'Nautie Pixie :),' but that's another story and has nothing to do with this one.) Be the results of the investigation as they may, what interested me was Southwest's CRM reaction to the imbroglio.

Isn't that a great word, "imbroglio?" Try working it into a conversation this week. It's not even that I'd ever assumed Southwest was perfect. I'm sure they have their issues, it's CRM axiom that all companies do, and that, in fact, when a customer has a problem with you, that's a Golden Opportunity to bind that customer to you like Krazy Glue.

Southwest officials swore like rappers that it was not, repeat, not a flight safety issue. Fine. Let's take their word for it and see it as a customer service issue, not a flight security issue. As Southwest has been such a holographic example of CRM from Day One, I, and the rest of the fraternity, assumed they would knock it out of the park.

The chalk in this situation, how we draw it up at practice, what Paul Greenberg and Ye Lesser Gods of CRM tells you to do with disgrunded customers is to feel their pain, acknowledge the problem, keep the customer informed of efforts to rectify the problem. Offer the customer something tangible to let him know you care - another hamburger cooked properly, frequent flier miles, something in your wife's size, whatever the situation calls for. This is called Winning Over A Customer.