Northwest Airlines to Bring Laser-like Focus to Customer Service

From the In the Sky blog at USAToday, comes this announcement: Northwest to Give Workers Customer-Service Training.

Awright. It's a step. And it's in the right direction.

As for the training initiative, NWA apparently considered it previously only to scrap it during bankruptcy restructuring. "In hindsight, it was probably a mistake" to drop the program, [CEO, Doug] Steenland said.

Probably. Given your industry is in near-commodity status with the nearly the same prices, planes, seats, pretzels, cancellations, time on tarmac, unhappy customers, demoralized employees, cattle-car quality of transportation....

A pilot for the airline and union spokesman had this to say:

They need to give some sort of relief to employees before we give back to customers. One of the pieces of the customer service puzzle is meeting the needs of your employees, and they, in turn, will meet the needs of customers.

There is no way possible to begin customer-service initiatives if you're employees remain demotivated, bitter, demoralized, angry, resentful. Too often management forgets that employees are their customers. Employees can either buy the message or you can force feed it to them. NWA has tried the latter.

You set the tone for customer service first with how you treat your employees. Inspire them...they'll inspire your customers. Customer Service starts first with employees who care, have a reason to care and have the mandates and incentives to deliver that care in a meaningful way to their colleagues including customers.