I found such a brilliant blog post the other day and thought I would share it with you.
It’s such a simple concept, really. Tell the truth when something goes wrong and the customer will often understand and be supportive. Lie and CYA…and you send customers into a rage. When people are lied to, they wig out.
Let’s forward backward to a situation when I was stranded on the tarmac last December for over three hours. It was snowing hard and a rookie ground crew didn’t know how to apply the de-icer. They tried three times over the three hours and failed miserably each time.
The difference: The pilot was on the intercom every 15 minutes, updating us, sharing his frustration. At one point, when it looked as if we might actually get off, he said, “The crew chief on the tarmac just held up four fingers…I gave him one finger back.” The whole plane roared with laughter.
Read the complete blog post about customer service and management in travel: Lies, Lies and More Lies by Bill Geist
