BusinessWeek Cover Story: An Extraordinary Fumble at JetBlue
The cover story of the latest issue of BusinessWeek is a study of the country's 25 best brands in terms of customer service. This report undoubtedly took a couple of months to prepare, but jetBlue, which had originally been ranked #4, was booted entirely after their Valentine's Day storm fiasco. They explain why in the story excerpted below.
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BusinessWeek:
Quote:
An Extraordinary Fumble at JetBlue
March 5, 2007
Cover Story
You've got to give the guy some credit. It's not every day that the CEO of a public company--especially a CEO who's just emerging from a crisis like the one JetBlue Airways CEO David Neeleman weathered recently--shows up on the Late Show With David Letterman. But there he was on national TV just after midnight on Feb. 21, suffering through guffaws at his expense ("We'll make him wait for a change," Letterman told Barbara Walters, who preceded Neeleman as a guest) and somberly promising that his airline would do better. "What will you do now," Letterman asked as the crowd roared, "to keep JetBlue from being the punchline to a joke--which is my contribution?"
Good question. Since Feb. 14, when a devastating ice storm struck JetBlue's home base, New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport, the airline has been digging itself out of an operational and public-relations quagmire. Suddenly the carrier that was going to "bring humanity back to air travel" was trapping passengers on planes for hours, canceling more than 1,000 flights over six days, and admitting to near-chaos in its operations. "We should have acted quicker," says Neeleman. "We should have had contingency plans that were better baked to be able to [unload] customers. We should have called the Port Authority quicker. These were all lessons learned from that experience."
Sharpen your pencils, business school profs. JetBlue's service recovery has all the makings of a Tylenol-caliber case study, starring a repentant CEO, a host of grand gestures to customers, and a few daring publicity coups (like Letterman). Still, the road to recovery isn't paved with TV appearances. What matters most is execution--doing the deep, hard, organizational work to ensure the crisis never happens again. While JetBlue recognizes that fact, it still has plenty to prove, especially to those passengers fuming over their ruined vacation or time forever lost to the inside of an airplane. More...
