“We all make mistakes. Anyone willing and determined to strive for something better will probably make more mistakes than someone who provides only status quo service. But mistakes are a small price to pay for the successes that follow failed attempts. A true test of exceptional service can be found in the actions a company or an individual takes to turn mistakes into a positive experience.”
This is certainly a topical issue in the light of the fiasco that was the launch of Heathrow’s Terminal 5 last week. As mistakes go that one is way up there in the order of magnitude.
One might argue, however, that it was a rather unfortunate consequence for British Airways when their original goal was to move way beyond “status quo service.” Unfortunately there can be no doubt, when it comes to the second part of that statement, that they completely missed the boat (or should that be the plane?) There certainly does not appear to have been any effort to turn the negative into a positive, and statements apologising “for the inconvenience” would have been more likely to raise hackles than soothe the feelings of those traveller’s whose annual holidays or important business trips were totally disrupted.
Apart from the television coverage of the mountains of luggage piling up, the lasting impression for me was the one of the senior executive turning his back on a camera crew and refusing to answer the reporter’s questions. That conveyed the sense of personal embarrassment with no feeling whatsoever for the customers’ feelings and absolutely no clue of the need to do everything possible to retrieve the situation. Subsequent acceptance of ‘total responsibility’ by the CEO simply confirmed the sense that, even at that late stage, he was only expressing what he thought he had to, with no feeling for the customer.
Undoubtedly the scale of the predicament was unprecedented and there was no text book for them to refer to, but the management handling of the situation turned what was a company disaster into a complete catastrophe. There was absolutely no concept of the fact that “It is better to spend money refunding clients when they aren’t satisfied than to forfeit money in lost accounts for the same reason.” Unfortunately this is a service business where compensation is as important as refunds, and efforts to minimise customer claims for hotel accommodation actually suggested the completely opposite philosophy.
No doubt there will be a massive enquiry to find out how BA ever got itself into this mess, and rightly questions will be asked as to:
1. Why was such a massive conversion attempted in the first place, rather than having a more traditional ‘phased’ implementation?
2. What kind of risk assessment was done?
3. Why was there not a contingency plan in place for if things did go wrong?
And that doesn’t include the probing to find out what actually did go wrong and why. But how many will ask ‘Where did customer service come into the equation?’ and ‘What could have been done to minimise the loss of goodwill?’
Forget for a moment that it happened to BA and ask yourself, ‘What would my company have done if it had happened to us?’ And then consider the wisdom of Hal Rosenbluth’s words, and the lessons they contain. However, there is little point in asking what he would have done in such a situation, for, with his philosophy, such disasters would never happen in the first place.