Valentine’s Day, 2007, a winter ice storm hit New York. Weather conditions were being predicted to cease and people continued about their travel day to John F. Kennedy airport. The conditions never cleared and and many passengers waited for up to 6 hours to return to an open gate traveling in. That day only 17 of the 156 flights left which left many passengers frustrated, furious, and stranded. It seemed to be a disaster for management who was trying to figure out what to do. Even pilots, flight attendants, and staff from the airport who were staying in the in NY wanted to help but there was no direction as to what management was going to do.

Eventually management had decided to give their passengers who waited more than 3 hours full refunds and a free voucher for a round trip flight. They also issued the Customer Bill of Rights which offers explicit compensation for passengers who involuntarily have to take a different flight.

Overall, I think that what JetBlue could have done was perhaps have an emergency backup plan when weather conditions do not cease. It is always extremely important to have a backup plan just in case the unfortunate happens. JetBlue publicly apologized for the mishap and it seemed to be made a bigger deal than it actually was. Yes, weather conditions and delays happen. However, if they publicly apologized and had a compensation system in place it would have been significantly cheaper for them.

If you were a manager of JetBlue, what are your ideas and strategies into dealing with the mishap?

http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5880.html

When thinking about services we jump to think of the service being done rather than how the service is being done. Customer satisfaction relies on how the product is being delivered. That being said, management must give proper training to their employees in order to provide a service.

According to an article from the Mckinsey Quarterly “The human factor in service design”https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Operations/The_human_factor_in_service_design_2922#  customer satisfaction is the balance of trade offs between the costs of services and the customer experience. Attaining both can be difficult to manage. It is interesting to think because there can be great services, however is the delivery is no on point then this reduces the customer satisfaction and this “good” service has lowered its standards when it could have potentially been great for the company.

What I found interesting from the article was that it stated that when companies brain storm for new products they forget the psychological aspects of what satisfies us humans. For example, a study was done for a rent-a-car company in terms of trying to find a new product selection for each customer. The results said that regular costumers were much more intimidated when it came to being in larger crowds compared to premium customers. As a result, the company value segmented its regular customers and implemented that they were willing to accept cars with higher mileage with lower rental rates. The reality is that new customers are the make or break deal. Services offer customer interaction so a good chance is that how an employee does his or her job for the customer will reflect if they are willing to continue the service or not.

This goes back to the first activity in class that we did, Paper Puppet. There were many ethical issues that were being acted out. Overall, in the end there was a lack of communication between the employees and the employer. What the employer should have done was restructure and establish teams with cross-functional membership to review key services periodically. This stresses the importance production goals but making sure that employees are getting treated fairly and factors of company culture,, training, etc all come into play.

I personally believe that successful companies provide effective communication and have great team building strategies. I feel that in order to successfully better the company, each employee should find ways to better themselves as well as work together to strive for great customer satisfaction. Not only will this improve the company internally, but with a better mindset it improves production and can help in releasing new products or services frequently and successfully.

What do you think are the key factors in successful team production?