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February 19, 2007
When a company really, really blows it, it's hard for me to pass up. By now you might have heard of the problems JetBlue airlines suffered in the aftermath of a New England snow storm. They dropped the ball big time. No company is immune from major situations. The more we learn from other companies dropping the ball, the more situations we can hopefully plan for and avoid ourselves. Andy had a great post about under promising and over delivering last week. This one goes right with it. From The Sierra Times:
But it wasn't just delayed flights that hurt the company. According to reports, the company suffered a major breakdown in operations. It's systems became overloaded and, in some cases, simply shut down. Customers were being told conflicting information from JetBlue employees. Luggage was piling up and getting lost. Phones were going unanswered.
Indeed. Mr. Neeleman has a lot of reasons to be "humiliated and mortified". It's understandable that a storm could ground some planes. But should a storm cause a company to completely loose the ability to handle its customers for an entire week? The storm wasn't that bad. Obviously I don't know everything that's going on. But I would say that this incident will cost JetBlue customers and create trust issues with many people for years. It's going to be very hard for the company to recover its good name after a "meltdown" of this capacity. If I was running JetBlue, and assuming the cancellations had to be done, I would refund customers for their canceled flights. When things were back up and running I'd offer to fly them for free to wherever they were supposed to be going. I'd give them a free ticket for their next flight. And I'd offer customers free lodging to wait out the next storm. You have to treat people right. Especially when your company falls apart. And if you don't… you run a great risk of falling apart again. So what does this all have to do with the Internet and marketing, you ask? Our businesses might be different, but the potential for meltdown is the same. JetBlue was utterly and completely unprepared for this event. You need to make sure your company doesn't suffer the same fate. Prepare yourself now. Do you have plans in place to handle power outages? Ten times more traffic than usual? An explosion of calls and/or orders? If not… you, too, might fall apart. And by then it won't be a matter of preventative measures. Instead, you'll be trying to figure out how you're going to recover. How well do you think your company could suffer a situation like the one JetBlue is dealing with? What's that old saying, again? You know… the one about an ounce of prevention being worth a pound of the cure?
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