Is your organisation accountable? I know, it sounds horrible, like you’re on trial and if you mess up, you’ll be hauled off to prison. But really, it’s just a matter of making a good faith effort–or, in some circumstances, you really have to deliver–on what you said you were going to do for the client or customer. So, if you’re delivering babies, a good faith effort just isn’t going to get it.
I started thinking about accountability over the Holidays when an airline was supposed to take us home on an 8 o’clock flight. We checked in at around 6:30 pm and were ready to go an hour before take off. Then they said there was a mechanical problem and there would be a half-hour delay. Well, you’d want them to fix the plane.
Then, around nine they said the plane couldn’t be fixed, but they were getting another plane. Our fellow passengers started squirming in the airport. Then, at ten they said the crew wasn’t allowed to hang around any longer, was sent home, and the flight had been cancelled.
A General Commotion
There ensued a general commotion in which some passengers started screaming at the gate personnel, and other passengers objected on the grounds that it was unfair to take out one’s frustrations on people who essentially have no authority.
But that’s the point, right? It’s not as though the airline’s CEO was going to show up in terminal B. And Useless Air was doing what about this? Well, there was a long queue for vouchers for hotel rooms and tentative booking on a flight three days from now.
By this time, around 1 am to be exact, yours truly is losing his normally sunny disposition. Plan B: rent a car (we’d just returned the car hours earlier) and drive to Heathrow in the middle of the night for a 7 am flight to New York and another on to California. OK, it was not the end of the world, but it was A Hard Day’s Night.
Marketing 101
Did we ever hear a word from the airline? As in, did you guys make it home OK, we’re sorry, can we pay for your rental car? No, no and no again.
Obviously, this is a marketing disaster. Multiply our situation by a few hundred passengers on the one plane alone, and you get the idea. After all, we had a deal. We buy a ticket, you fly the plane.
Did we complain, call our representative, lodge a complaint with the authorities? No, we’re just not going to use them anymore. In fact, I’ll gladly pay much more to avoid using them in the future. And I’ll bet they’re paying an ad agency, a marketing department, and all kinds of people millions to advertise their product. What a waste.
So the moral of the story: it’s always cheaper to deliver than to lose business. And, always take the first flight out in the morning. Never take the last flight out at night.
