On JetBlue and CRM

SearchCRM.com is running an interesting take on the whole JetBlue fiasco which resulted in 1,102 people having flights cancelled when an ice storm shut down flight routes out of New York City last week – or, as JetBlue CEO David Neeleman put it, ““Obviously […] the most difficult time in our history.”

The article “Is there a CRM lesson in JetBlue’s snafu?” has SearchCRM.com news director Barney Beal demonstrating how, via judicious use of customer service, JetBlue is managing to salvage any bit of customer loyalty out of the problems which were “a significant blow to JetBlue’s reputation for service.”

JetBlue, notes Beal, “has received praise from some CRM analysts for its approach to customer service. It has also earned CRM accolades for its early use of at-home agents, allowing service representatives to take reservations at home. JetBlue operates a call center in Salt Lake City, Utah, with 1,500 agents working from their homes, backed up by 500 people in a central location. However, in the wake of the storm and the subsequent cancellations, the center was overwhelmed.”

The result, of course, was folks waiting on the telephone for assistance for an hour or more, the CRM equivalent of having to spend ten hours in an airplane on the runway or twenty-four hours in an airport.

Well publicized was Neeleman’s announcement posted on the JetBlue website, in which he, King John-like, proclaimed a customer Magna Charta … um, customer bill of rights. In hard cash terms, JetBlue promises to repay inconvenienced customers vouchers for up to the full ticket price.

Over at SearchCRM, CRM consultancy 56 Group LLC president Paul Greenberg compliments Neeleman and co. for doing exactly the right thing. “[JetBlue’s] proactive attempt to create a JetBlue-specific passenger bill of rights is a good sign […] because they are institutionalizing the solution that is likely to best work for their customers in advance of future problems.”

“One bad experience washes away a lot of good ones, and in this case, we are seeing what airline CRM is like,” Denis Pombriant, managing principal of Beagle Research, kicked in. “In airline CRM you get all the buzzwords and none of the follow-through.” Even more effusive was at least one crisis management expert quoted in The Globe and Mail.

Thanks to the “blizzard of mea culpas,” reads the piece, “crisis management experts said JetBlue is making all the right moves after its initial blunders.” NYU Leonard N. Stern School of Business management communications program director Irv Schenkler emphatically stated that JetBlue had proven themselves “100 miles an hour ahead of the typical corporate response to crises in the United States.”