JetBlue’s Crisis Response

One week after the start of JetBlue’s Valentines Day operational fiasco and they’ve come back with an official response to this crisis. The response includes a Customer Bill of Rights which defines a series of retributions if your flight is delayed, a full page apology in the NY Times, and an email letter to customers. This is a pretty strong statement from a company that’s taken a beating in the press and a pretty big hit on Wall Street. In a nutshell, JetBlue admitted to significant issues with their ability to recover from the initial delays caused by the storms on Valentines Day and has come back with what essentially is a SLA (service level agreement) on their performance. Unlike many technology SLA’s, this one has teeth and defines conditions for which specific retributions will be made and other actions that they guarantee.

You can learn a lot on crisis management from JetBlue’s response.

  • Contain and recover from the problem – Bring back operational stability quickly, safely, and painlessly.
  • Own up to the issues and problems.
  • Communicate with customers, especially the ones that were most affected by the crisis.
  • Respond with a strong statement and commitment to improving quality and service levels.
  • There is a small question on how quickly they can really implement the systems to track these service levels, report on hot sports, implement the retributions, and handle customer service issues related to their Bill of Rights.

JetBlue now has a real hard cost to delays and other service level issues. It’s a big price tag, but now that the cost can be quantified, it will give JetBlue real incentive to make operational, service, and other improvements to minimize these costs. Does this mean that JetBlue will raise prices to offset these costs? Will they cut services or destinations that become unprofitable given these new costs? Will other airlines follow suit?

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JetBlue's Systems Overwhelmed?

Computerworld reports that JetBlue's flight delays and cancellations days after the northeast ice storms on Feb 14 were due to an IT systems meltdown in Overwhelmed IT systems partly to blame for JetBlue meltdown.

Now bad weather should be nothing new for a major airline and getting flight schedules back to 'normal' after them should be something that they can respond to within a reasonable amount of time. So it begs the question whenever any airline fails to handle this type of crisis efficiently.

"So while we were dispatching people to the airports to help, which was great, they weren't trained to actually use the computer system. So we're going through a process now where we're actively training those crew members."
This sounds a lot more like real flaws in operations management and crisis management. In fact, it sounds to me that JetBlue's IT department really came to the rescue in this crisis:
JetBlue's IT department developed a database that allowed the airline's scheduling team to improve multitasking... the system, which was developed in 24 hours and implemented in the middle of JetBlue's crisis, has now been implemented as a full-time system
Some interesting stats on JetBlue (From the Feb/07 Air Travel Consumer Report )
  • In the 12 months ending Dec/06, JetBlue ranked 16 out of 20 (72.9%) in on time arrivals.
  • Dec/06 8.9% of regularly scheduled flights arrived late 70% of the time or more. This is higher than any other airline
  • The report breaks down late arriving flights by cause. For JetBlue in Dec/06, 5.88% of flights were delays attributed to the carrier vs 0.21% that were due to extreme weather.
  • JetBlue had one of the lowest flight cancellation rates 0f 0.4%
I'm picking at various data points, but this doesn't look to me like an isolated problem. Are JetBlue's systems really overwhelmed or are they simply over capacity and can't respond fast enough when weather or other issues cause significant delays?

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Yikes! - Office 2007 Training Fears Are Overblown, Microsoft Exec Says

From Office 2007 Training Fears Are Overblown, Microsoft Exec Says, Chris Capossela states the following about the new Ribbon in Office 2007
There are two data points that we talk about. No. 1 is, for your average Office user, we see that it takes them about two days of working with the product before they say, “I’ll never go back.” For your power user — the people who know the ins and outs of Excel, maybe the finance team, or the legal team when it comes to Word — it takes them more like two weeks before they’ll say, “Please don’t ever take this away.”
I fall into the category of Office power user, particularly in Excel. I've probably used 80%+ of the features in Excel including Pivots, Conditional Formatting, VBasic, Access Integration.... So when I read this article in Computerworld, my jaw dropped.

Two Weeks!!

I can't remember it taking me two weeks to learn any software application - ever. If I can't do something basic in a couple of hours, or complete basic tasks with a new application after a day of use, then I pretty much drop the application and try a new approach. Can you imagine if it took users two weeks to learn how to use the first version of the Netscape browser? What if it took two weeks of training to get a software developer to write their first Hello World app in Eclipse or in Visual Studio?

I have to be fair, I haven't seen Office 2007. Maybe it's true that the productivity benefits in the new version will make it all worthwhile, so I will hold final judgement (and will update this blog) when I do get around to testing Office 2007. But with a two week expected training period, migrating to Office 2007 will be at the bottom of my list.
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Dear Mr. Michael Dell

Welcome back to your post of CEO of Dell Computer. I sincerely home you can turn around your company's missteps in financial performance, customer service, and product offerings.

You don't know me, but I've been a Dell customer for 10+ years on my home computers as well as corporate purchases. My total spending at Dell is a blip, a sneeze, yet I'm certain that my experiences are probably shared among your more significant customers. Let me share a few of them.

1. Dell's website was always a winner for small businesses that had sufficient technical capabilities to spec out a machine. It was easy and fast pricing out a machine and putting an order in and it saved IT managers the long calls with sales people to get a machine built to specification. The problem is, we soon discovered that there were several paths through Dell's website each offering different component configurations and pricing. We also learned that if we called our sales rep we could often get better discounts and other benefits than what was available online. So we lost the simplicity; We were forced to spec things online several times, then forced to call our reps anyway. Bottom line, we need to get these discounts online and have confidence that we're getting the best price without the added hassles.

2. About once a month I overhear my partner's frustrated and angry with a Dell rep. He's made several requests to have our billing address changed, yet the bills keep returning to our original address. Why is it so hard for Dell to do a simple address change? Here's why this is important; when a CFO, Controller, or someone in the accounting staff has recurring issues getting the bills paid, they start to question the IT Managers' choices and decisions on their choice of vendors. IT managers are extraordinarily loyal, so don't put them in a difficult spot with the folks who sign the checks.

3. A couple of weeks ago, my Dell laptop's hard drive began to sputter and failed. We have gold support on this laptop, so I called Dell over the weekend to get the issue resolved. The tech support specialist I talked to was excellent and it didn't take him long to go through his playbook and agree with my own self diagnostic. Dell would ship me a new drive, but I would have to go through the installation steps on my own with my Tech Support's help if and where needed. Ok, not a big problem for me. I then found out that Dell no longer ships CDs of the drivers needed for my laptop and one of these magic CDs was not shipped with my original purchase. I would have to download the drivers using another computer, burn them on a CD, and install them myself in the right order. All this because 'Manufacturing' decided that they would no longer ship driver CDs for my out of service laptop, a Latitiude D610. Is it so hard for Manufacturing to stock these CD's?

I then got an email reminding me to send back my original, broken, hard drive. Now if this were any other part, I would take no issue. But a hard drive with personal and proprietary information? There's no info in the email or notes guaranteeing privacy or that data on the disk would be wiped clean. Does Dell really need this drive back?

Bottom line: when a customer's drive goes bad, your dealing with them at a lowest hour. Some better corporate bedside manner is in order. And asking for a customer to send a disk drive back is a ridiculous policy.

Please look to address these issues as you look to reinvigorate Dell Computer.

Thanks
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About Isaac Sacolick

Isaac Sacolick is President of StarCIO, a technology leadership company that guides organizations on building digital transformation core competencies. He is the author of Digital Trailblazer and the Amazon bestseller Driving Digital and speaks about agile planning, devops, data science, product management, and other digital transformation best practices. Sacolick is a recognized top social CIO, a digital transformation influencer, and has over 900 articles published at InfoWorld, CIO.com, his blog Social, Agile, and Transformation, and other sites. You can find him sharing new insights @NYIke on Twitter, his Driving Digital Standup YouTube channel, or during the Coffee with Digital Trailblazers.