What are the lessons of the United Airlines Crisis?

If you lead, work for, or promote an organization that serves customers or the public, this blog is for you.

The shocking video of United Airlines passenger being dragged off a plane because the airline wanted to give his seat to an employee is a reminder how fast a bad customer interaction can explode into a worldwide news story and crisis.

We live in an age where consumers and the public can record every interaction they have during the day whether shopping, driving, at a customer service counter, or being stopped by the police. In some cases, these images can highlight claims of racial discrimination as in the case of a Victoria Secret store in Alabama, or questionable police behavior as in the recent situation in Sacramento.

While organizations, including United, work hard to serve and please their customers sometimes a bad decision or just bad luck can damage a business reputation. United’s failure in three key areas, policy, people, and PR contributed to their epic crisis from this incident.

Let me explain. First, United should not have a policy of bumping paid passengers off a plane for staff to fly to another location. If they need staff on a flight, book them on that flight and don’t oversell the plane.

Second, train all United staff better to diffuse problem situations. The United staff working the flight in question should have recognized the problem with the passenger who refused to give up his seat and never allowed security to be called to remove him. They could have flown the plane without the United staff member getting that seat and worked instead to get that staff member on another flight or found a replacement staff member at the location the staff member needed to reach. For goodness sake, United is clearly prepared to handle staff that gets sick suddenly, grounded by weather, or called away for a family emergency.

Finally, after the first two mistakes were made, United failed in its PR response. The initial reaction of the CEO served to defend the action rather than offer an immediate and sincere apology to the passenger and all passengers on the plane. This should have been followed by an acknowledgement that United is taking action to change its policies to no longer bump passengers to accommodate United staff travel.

Given these failures, here is a checklist of steps your organization can take to reduce the risk of a customer video causing lasting damage to your brand;

• Prepare a crisis communications plan with input from all levels of the organization. The CEO and chief communications officer should lead the plan’s development and its adoption organization-wide;
• Train all employees on proper procedures to diffuse customer situations and who to call if a situation gets out of hand or more expertise is needed;
• Track and analyze customer complaints and examine how changes in policies can improve customer satisfaction and reduce complaints;
• Monitor mentions of your company on social media and media outlets in real time to identify customer issues (track trends to see if they are up or down and to spot new or recurring issues);
• Establish and staff an early warning center to alert management of potential crisis situations such as customer complaints, negative news articles or social media posts, staff or customer injuries at company locations, etc.; and
• Acknowledge mistakes in real time, recognizing that if a customer has been harmed or mistreated you have to take immediate action to apologize and make remedy.

If your organization already has a crisis communications plan, this is a good time to revisit it and to talk about the United, Wells Fargo, and Mylan's EpiPen crisis to absorb the lessons these examples offer.

Let me know what you think.

Frank Walter, President, Impala Communications, frank@impalacom.com