Yesterday's Wall Street Journal carried a front-page article on Capt. Denn Flanagan, a United pilot, who is very good at something we call customer service.
Some examples:
And when unaccompanied children are on his flights, he personally calls parents with reassuring updates. "I picked up the phone and he said, 'This is the captain from your son's flight,' " said Kenneth Klein, whose 12-year-old son was delayed by thunderstorms in Chicago last month on a trip from Los Angeles to see his grandfather in Toronto. "It was unbelievable. One of the big problems is kids sit on planes and no one tells you what's happening, and this was the exact opposite."
When pets travel in cargo compartments, the United Airlines veteran snaps
pictures of them with his cellphone camera, then shows owners that their animals
are on board. In the air, he has flight attendants raffle off 10% discount
coupons and unopened bottles of wine.
The examples go on and on. Pretty impressive stuff.
Thus, you have to ask yourself:
- What is it about Flanagan that makes him do this? I don't have stats but I'm guessing he represents 1 percent of commercial pilots.
- Why is that we are so amazed by this? The article in the Journal, written by Scott McCartney, has an almost "can you believe this?" tone to it. Shouldn't this be the norm?
- Most important, why is this something that happened from the bottom up? From what I've read, this has nothing to do with United and its management. Companies spend millions trying to crack the code on customer service and in the end it comes down to a few common sense ideas. Nothing more nothing less.
I'd be real interested in seeing how a company can duplicate this on a broader scale. And maybe I've answered my own question. If this is so amazing to us, maybe it's because it's so hard to do on a large scale.
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