The failure to give your organization the flexibility to serve customers is a big mistake. Many companies make this mistake. Often the basic problem is managers don’t trust that their systems to hire and develop people that will make good decisions. The solution to this problem is not to give your staff no authority. The solution is to manage your systems so that you can trust your people. This is not as easy to do as it is to say, I will grant that.
Southwest Airlines and Zappos are companies that do respect employees. And those employees then provide great service. But it isn’t a simple thing. To truly manage a system with respect for people isn’t as easy as just putting up some slogans. But if you want to provide good customer service this is one requirement. There are plenty of others: continual improvement, evidence based management, customer focus, systems thinking…
These thoughts were prompted by a nice post, jetBlue Just Blew It
Of course their site has a lot of bookings and almost no one makes an error like this. But any UI designer who looks at their site could see that it’s absolutly possible since the length of the trip is never revealed except for the flight dates. (I”m arguing that they could put in a little fading header that tells you how long your trip is for.) If’ I’d see anywhere that my trip was scheduled for 35 days I’d have immediately know there was an issue. (I could make a simple change to the jetBlue UI that would solve this problem for everyone within a day.)
Today when I looked at my emailed itinerary I immediately spotted the problem and went online to change my ticket. They have a $100 change fee which I paid thinking I’d give them a call and that surely they’d waive that. After all, it wasn’t a change I was asking for, it was the ticket I wanted in the first place. It was less than 24 hours and the flight wasn’t for a month.
But no.
In speaking to the customer service rep who ‘called’ a manager. I was informed that I had only a 4 hour window to make any changes and that after that, there was nothing anyone could do. You see, no one at jetBlue customer service has the ‘authority’ to refuse this fee. It was company policy that they couldn’t actually do anything.
He makes a good usability point too. Almost no organizations I have dealt with have any apparent capability to accept these good suggestions (improving the UI). That is something you should work on for your company if you expect to continually improve more quickly than others (continually improvement is simple, what makes an organization successful is doing it faster than most organizations).
Related: CEO Flight Attendant – Hire People You Can Trust to Do Their Job – People are Our Most Important Asset
This is an awesome post. For the record, the world would be a better place if more managers followed your advice.
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Great post John. It’s remarkable how much more attentive to customers companies can be if they allow their staff to make decisions based on situations rather than policies. I wonder how many customers get soured by companies that simply read them the rule book instead of work with them to resolve the situation.
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