😟"But Mommmmmm. It wasn't my fault. Eric made me do it."
🤦♂️Did that work with your parents? It didn't with mine.
👎Guess what...it doesn't work with your customers either.
🚫🛫🚫Over the weekend, Southwest Airlines had a colossal operational meltdown. 1000s of flights canceled. Families stranded. Employees stranded. Some really heartbreaking stories out there. Human stories.
👈Originally the airline blamed weather and air traffic control.
🙄Customers were quick to point out...hmmm...so the weather only affects your airline and not the many others flying the same area?
😫With an absence of information that rang true, our world of social media found a way to create even worse scenarios with all sorts of rumors flying about.
🙏Now...Southwest is finally being...almost...clear about the actual staffing issues at the core of it. (Quote and Dallas News source link below...I don't do rumors) Yet...there's still finger pointing going on in the interview.
👉👈A TON of customer goodwill has been lost here. There's no getting around the bad news so don't start pointing fingers elsewhere...especially when the customer can discern the truth.
🥺Instead...face it head on...be honest. Own up to the mistake. Promise to be better. PROVE how you'll be better.
🛠➡💞Don't fix issues...Restore the relationship!
🤨You'll still lose some goodwill...but not as much as you do if you blame others.
🪑Southwest...you're now in time out. Think about what you've done. When you're ready to apologize and make things right, I'm sure your parents (your customers) will welcome you back.
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Source for content below https://www.dallasnews.com/business/airlines/2021/10/11/we-just-had-a-bad-weekend-southwest-airlines-incoming-ceo-apologizes-for-flight-disruptions/
Incoming CEO Bob Jordan "A big piece of this too is trying to get the aircraft and the crews back together — what I would call crew margin. We’re still continuing to deal with staffing issues. That was a piece of this but it wasn’t the largest part of this. But the tighter the crew margin is and the staffing margin, the smaller amount of room you have to manage through a problem. So we just need to keep going after staffing and getting crew margins and our overall employee margin back. You’ve heard about the tremendous focus on staffing from us and that’s why."
Q: Did you over-schedule last weekend? It was the busiest schedule you have had since the pandemic began.
A: No. Did we have as much staffing and the crew margin as we would like, especially historically? No.