Smile. Swallow. Repeat.
January 13th, 2007I read in WSJ the other day a horror story about holiday travel plans ruined by the storm late in December. Thousands - actually, tens of thousands - of folks were stranded, some in airports, and many in a far worse place: on a plane, on the runway.
I won’t go through the details, but after nearly 30 hours of delay, one passenger said this:
“The most maddening thing was that no one from [the airline] ever approached us and apologized. I still don’t understand what happened. If I had an explanation from [them], I’d feel better.”
She didn’t ask for someone to make it right. She didn’t ask for a voucher, for food, for a hotel, for anything that cost anything. She just wanted an apology.
When are we - not just airlines, but any company, division, department, team, manager - going to learn that apologies are the grease that smooths a crisis… and often the glue that holds a dissatisfied customer to a vendor who has stumbled?
Pride is like your vegetables: it doesn’t taste terrible (except for asparagus), and swallowing it is good for you.
Smile. Swallow. Repeat.
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January 13th, 2007 at 3:40 pm
I echo this post about apologies - both from an effective manager perspective and from a basic human interaction perspective (http://www.peace.ca/kindergarten.htm).
Not to get off topic, but as a reformed asparagus hater, the trick is peeling them first.
(http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/recipes/recipe/0,1977,FOOD_9936_19396,00.html)
Cheers!
Chris
January 15th, 2007 at 11:39 pm
……….this is despite the fact that airlines typically spend millions on their A&P which is actually another form of communication. The company People are so myopic not to see this as an opportunity for some of the cheapest but most effective form of advertisement/PR. Maybe people are just too scared to take the bull by it’s horns. Maybe they just couldn’t be bothered.
January 16th, 2007 at 3:26 pm
It seems I’ve read about this somewhere, a couple of decades ago. Could it be that by apologizing, the airline reps could be admitting responsibility that could be somehow be used against them in a lawsuite?
January 16th, 2007 at 11:42 pm
Not in this case Chuck. Storms are act of god and not flying is a decision taken in the interest of everybody. That’s why it’s a good opportunity wasted!
January 16th, 2007 at 11:50 pm
And let’s not make it about the airlines. That was just the spark in the tinderbox. No industry remains untainted.
Mark
March 7th, 2007 at 10:21 am
I think it is not just in this certain case. In the company I also can see some manager is afraid to accept the mistake they made, and they prefer to do other expiation, and most time it was wrong.
” that apologies are the grease that smooths a crisis…”