advertisement
Bob Emig was flying home from St. Louis on Southwest Airlines (LUV, news, msgs) this past December when an all-too-familiar travel nightmare began to unfold. After his airplane backed away from the gate, he and his fellow passengers were told the plane would need to be de-iced.
When the aircraft was ready to fly two and a half hours later, the pilot had reached the hour limit set by the Federal Aviation Administration, and a new pilot was required. By that time, the plane had to be de-iced again. Five hours after the scheduled departure time, Emig's flight was finally ready for takeoff.
A customer service disaster, right? Not to hear Emig tell it. The pilot walked the aisles, answering questions and offering constant updates. Flight attendants, who Emig says "really seemed like they cared," kept up with the news on connecting flights. And within a couple of days of arriving home, Emig, who travels frequently, received a letter from Southwest that included two free round-trip ticket vouchers.
"I could not believe they acknowledged the situation and apologized," says Emig. "Then they gave me a gift, for all intents and purposes, to make up for the time spent sitting on the runway."
Emig's "gift" from the airline was not the result of an unusually kind customer service agent who took pity on his plight. Nor was it a scramble to make amends after a disastrous operational fiasco, as JetBlue Airways (JBLU, news, msgs) experienced recently -- leading us, after much debate, to remove it from our first customer service ranking. Rather, it was standard procedure for Southwest Airlines, which almost six years ago created a new high-level job that oversees all proactive communications with customers. Fred Taylor, who was plucked from the field by President Colleen C. Barrett to fill the role in 2001, coordinates information that's sent to all frontline reps in the event of major flight disruptions. But he's also charged with sending out letters, and in many cases flight vouchers, to customers caught in major storms, air traffic snarls or other travel messes -- even those beyond Southwest's control -- that would fry the nerves of a seasoned traveler. "It's not something we had to do," says Taylor. "It's just something we feel our customers deserve."
More from MSN Money and BusinessWeek
As Southwest recognizes, providing great customer service is much more than just a job for the front lines or the call centers. It takes coordination from the top, bringing together people, management, technology and processes to put customers' needs first. That's true today more than ever. Technology is leveling the barriers between alpha companies and also-rans, making great customer service one of the few ways companies can distinguish themselves. Retail, online and phone shopping channels are expanding, increasingly prompting customers to demand a seamless -- and painless -- experience. Refining time-tested concepts and coming up with cutting-edge ideas is critical for managing rank-and-file workers and measuring what customers think.
In BusinessWeek's first-ever ranking of the best providers of customer service, we set out to find the service champions, but also to dig into the techniques, strategies and tools they use to make the customer king. To launch the process, we created a list based largely on brands in J.D. Power & Associates database. In addition, we polled 3,000 of our readers, generating a pool of names most associated with treating customers well. We then asked J.D. Power, which, like BusinessWeek, is owned by McGraw-Hill (MHP, news, msgs), to survey customers about the brands that were nominated by readers but not already in its database.
The resulting list has its share of service legends -- our No. 1 company, insurance provider USAA, has long been hailed for the way it treats its predominantly military customers and their families. Most of the names fell into one of three camps. There are industry disrupters, such as No. 14 Washington Mutual (WM, news, msgs), that offer a customer-friendly alternative in fields long plagued by poor service. Many are privately held or family-run, such as regional supermarket Publix Super Markets, No. 19 on our list, and view great customer service as a founding, fundamental principle. Finally, there's a sprinkling of luxury brands, such as No. 7 Toyota Motor's (TM, news, msgs) Lexus, for which attentive, personal service is just part of the price of entry.
Despite their differences, most of the names on our list share a few important traits. They emphasize employee loyalty as much as customer loyalty, keeping their people happy with generous benefits and perks. Since 1984, No.5 Wegmans, a grocery chain, has given away $59 million in scholarships to 19,000 employees. And senior management logs hours on the front lines, listening in on phones in the call center or working by staffers' sides. At No. 15 Cabela's (CAB, news, msgs), for instance, Vice Chairman James W. Cabela spends hours each morning reading through the sporting-goods retailer's customer comments and hand-delivering them to each department, circling the issues he'd like to have addressed. While treating employees right and staying close to the front lines may sound like simplistic platitudes, they're also the hard truth about the hard work of getting service right.
When good service goes bad
Most of the companies on our list also know how to respond when service goes wrong, as Southwest did in Emig's case.Even customers of the best companies suffer the occasional long wait, crabby rep or mishandled billing statement. Much rarer is the sort of spectacular service catastrophe that befell JetBlue recently, when an ice storm stranded passengers on planes for as long as 10 1/2 hours at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport. A disastrous cocktail of aircraft congestion, frozen equipment, and poor decision-making led to a massive airport snarl and days of cancelled flights that could have a lasting impact on the airline's customer-friendly reputation. The airline originally came in at No. 4 on our list -- J.D. Power surveyed customers in early 2006 -- and it has a history of great service.
Video on MSN Money
Video: Best customer serviceCNBC's Maria Bartiromo discusses the top 25 companies for customer service with BusinessWeek's opinion editor James Ellis.
But in the wake of such a massive operational meltdown, we decided to take a wait-and-see approach this year before naming it one of our Customer Service Champs. The airline is working hard to repair its image with customers and promising a vast overhaul of procedures. But the true test will be how it executes on those commitments in the months and years ahead. "They're going to be suffering from this for a long time," says Valarie Zeithaml, a professor of marketing at the University of North Carolina's Kenan-Flagler Business School, who has written about service recovery. "But I trust that this CEO and this organization is going to come up with some new ways to recover."
Rate this Article
High
