Customer service lessons from Kevin Smith vs. Southwest Airlines

Wow, between waking up this morning to a dozens of great comments on the blog for packaging suggestions and also to the whole Kevin Smith vs. Southwest Airlines affair, it has been a pretty eventful morning!

My brothers and I are big fans of the SModcast and were thoroughly entertained by how the tabloids and blogo-sphere are flaring up with this incident.

As someone who now operates a small business that relies heavily on customer service and also as a sales professional with LOTS of experience diffusing REALLY bad situations (the construction industry is notorious for this), I have to say that Southwest really did drop the ball with this one.

Now, a quick disclaimer, I don’t care who was “in the right” and who was “in the wrong” on this one but my experience has taught me that employees need to be empowered to make things right and not feel like they are going to be maligned for taking the extra steps required to help a client or customer; even if it is not “right” as per the company policy.  In this case, it seems that Southwest employees probably just didn’t have the power (or think they had the power) to make an un-orthodox executive decision to make all parties happy.  In the end, my belief is you can choose to be “right” or happy.

If I were in Eric’s role (the manager who took over in dealing with the incident at the time), I would have not waited for Suzanne (the flight attendant) to approach me with the issue, I probably would have JUMPED into the situation, thanked Suzanne for doing the right thing (per company policy and her training, [presumably]) and to allow me to see if I can help to make the situation better for everyone.

What would have made the situation better?  It sounds like just asking the passengers adjacent to Kevin if they were uncomfortable (which they did), talk with the captain to inform him that while it may be arguable that he may be too big, the adjacent customers/passengers don’t object to his sitting between them, and apologizing (actually saying the words, “I’m sorry”) to Kevin for the inconvenience and letting the flight depart without further incident.

As it stands now, there is now a media/blogger circus being made over the issue.  Which option would have cost less PR man-hours?  I’m pretty sure that there wouldn’t have been a single Tweet issued if Kevin was just allowed to make the flight home.

A good point being made is that Kevin is someone fortunate enough to have a ‘platform’ to stand on and to be vocal about the incident.  What about individuals who don’t have such a platform?  Would Southwest just ask them to leave the plane and not apologize for the inconvenience? Would they have even cared?

On a final note here, I’m just so glad that our clients are such great people to work with.  Not every client of ours is an evangelist (many are!) but their objections have been fair and we go the extra step to see if we can fix any uncomfortable situations. Usually they become evangelists after we take those extra steps, too!

So, “Thank You!” to every and all Braithwaite clients!  You are the ones who really make this business fun and who have kept the vision alive for this company.  I’m glad to be able to share this journey with you.