When a passenger was physically and brutally dragged from his seat aboard United Airlines’s flight 3411 earlier this week – and when the footage of this scene went viral around the globe – the airline’s crisis response was shameful on multiple levels.
This is a terrible situation for any organization to find itself in, but to make matters worse, United showed no semblance of compassion or remorse for their abused customer and, as a result (so far at the time of this writing), the Internet is going crazy against the airline and United’s Chinese market is cutting up their United Mileage cards in anger.
In this week’s #CRISISREADY video, I evaluate United’s terrible response to this crisis and provide important tips to help you make sure you never find yourself repeating the airline’s crisis management fail. Take a look:
Update, evening of April 11th, 2017: United’s CEO, Oscar Munoz, finally issued a real apology this evening. And it’s well done. Now let’s hope they commit to the change they’ve promised.
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Comment below and let’s continue the conversation!
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This seems to be a situation where United developed a policy with the thought of disrupting the least number of passengers – display 4 (enough for a crew) so as not to disrupt 300 – 500 passengers by not having a crew available. That sounds very logical and prudent, but the implementation of the policy – was just not cool at all. In addition, we experience another situation where law enforcement [sometimes] responds with more force than appropriate or necessary for the specific situation. So a combination of customer service failures.
I have used this as a customer service teaching tool for my office about just implementing a policy and not thinking about the consequences on the customer. And more importantly alternative methods to implement the policy successfully.
Hi Dwight, I’m so glad to hear you’re taking the opportunity to use this as a teaching moment with your team. Now that’s a very #crisisready mindset! I’d be curious to hear the kinds of discussions it incited amongst your team. How did they react / respond?
Good stuff Melissa, as usual! So many lessons to be learned – where to begin. I really think it begins with your #CrisisReady hashtag (very smart btw!). When United or other airlines came up with this idea that we’ll ‘remove’ passengers if they don’t voluntarily give up their seats, did anyone ask, “what could possibly go wrong with this?” If they did, it’s pretty easy to conjure up a number of potentially ugly scenarios – at which point you ask, “is this policy worth the potential damage?”
That’s where our teams need to ‘think’ like a #CrisisReady organization. The flight crew could easily see everyone sitting around this guy had their phones out. We have to realize we live in a time where everyone has a video camera. Would the crew have intervened with security if there was a TV news photographer standing next to them shooting this? I’d like to think they would have.
We have to coach our teams to ‘think like an owner’ in our daily work. Don’t just blindly follow a policy that common sense tells you is not smart. Don’t just whine or complain about a policy, approach it from a proactive, brand reputation perspective. Owners, senior managers and executives will take notice when we raise concerns in this manner.
If you have a difficult issue that hits on the three elements at the top of Melissa’s video (emotionally compelling, relatable and shareable), you have a potential crisis in the works. Get ahead of it and empower your teams to do the same.
Extremely well said, Marc! This incident is going to a case study that will be referred to for a while. And it will be interesting to see what happens next – internally at United, as well as externally with their reputation.
Thanks for weighing in with such a thoughtful comment!
Melissa you make some excellent points as usual. Just a couple of further thoughts prompted by your comments. Seems to me the root of the problem here, especially because these screw-ups seem to be part of a trend with United, may be based in the corporate culture, that employees aren’t empowered to use common sense when faced with a situation they aren’t used to. If the culture was customer-focused and they had the freedom to make a decision how to handle it, that could nip this kind of thing in the bud, as it would have with the leggings issue a few weeks ago.
Also, you make an excellent point about being crisis ready and the need to respond quickly. For too many companies and organizations though, including I fully expect United, that crucial window to get a response out, those minutes are eaten up by lawyers messing around with wording, crippling the company’s ability to be quick.
And then, of course, there’s the added problem of the language the lawyers come up with, which is often ineffective and off the mark, as was the case here until, as you say, the CEO finally got it right. Too often lawyers are tone deaf to effective communication that will convey the right messages because they are focused, often totally, on language that they feel may mitigate litigation, which is, of course, a totally different thing. It’s a problem when the legal people are higher up the food chain than the communications people when there is a crisis at hand.
Hi Duncan,
It’s always great to hear from you!
You’re 100% correct in your observation of United having the wrong culture – this is the root cause of their frequently publicized problems (issues and crises). It also goes hand-in-hand with your next comment about Legal delaying response times and then coming out with an inadequate (and in this case almost offensive) response. And this too goes with culture.
To have a “crisis-ready culture”, means – in part – to train and empower team members to understand and identify risk and to be able to make smart decisions in the heat of the moment. It also means discussing things like crisis response, in accordance especially with the organization’s high-risk scenarios, with legal and compliance (amongst others) and to align on effective and appropriate response strategies. Legal has the job of protecting the liability of the organization, but they also need to understand that we live in a different world and taking 18 hours to come out with the type of statement that United ended up coming out with is unacceptable and, clearly, does more harm than anything else.
This is truly a great case for organizations to learn from. Including, hopefully, United.
Is anyone in #United who knows what #customer service or #empathy means?
Great video and message Melissa.
The CEO completely fumbled the initial response and the entire communications team botched the first 18 hours… more than likely a typical corporate reaction to something you know is going to be very problematic.
Look for approvals and legal to weigh in on every possible response until you’ve gone into full panic situation and the horses are out of the barn.
Obviously, they don’t trust their communications team which is another major problem with large corporate entities.
Where do you stand on autonomy for the communications team / Communications Director to have the freedom to do their jobs?
Tim
Hey Tim,
Oooh, that’s such a good question! I’m going to answer here, as well as in an upcoming video where I’ll be able to go a little more in depth, so stay tuned!
For a communications team to have autonomy in times of crisis requires that team to be VERY well prepared and trained – as it does the rest of the senior management team (including legal and compliance) so that everybody is on exactly the same page with aligned expectations and trust in the program.
It’s actually very rare for even a superbly well trained and crisis-savvy comms team to have explicit autonomy. In my experience, the best answer is to have the entire team – comms, senior management, legal, compliance, etc. – so well trained that they work together, covering all angles of risk for the organization, in a seamless, timely and effective fashion. But this requires having that crisis-ready corporate culture I’m always talking about.
I often fly United, not because I like them but because they go to the destination I am traveling to. I will tell you that I feel like I am going into battle every time I fly this airline. I carry the contract of carriage agreement with me. I will tell you there have been several times I have had to engage employees about problems and it was not pleasant. In my opinion, United Airlines customer service is atrocious, so atrocious I actually wrote the CEO an email about one of my trips that turned out horrible because of their airplane and their staff. So, here is two questions that I have been asked on different occasions about different companies.
1.) Would you refer this company to someone you know?
2.) Did you refer someone you know to this company?
Honestly, I warn alot of people away from this airline unless they have no other choice. Flying has become a business of inflicting misery on their customers, and if the flying public weren’t held hostage by the fact that they had no other choice, which the airlines know, they might just stop flying all together if there was another option.