Alaska Airlines Human Resources

Alaska Airlines
There are a number of potential contributing factors to customer service disasters. Organizational culture is a significant defense against such disasters – where behaviors that create such disasters are unthinkable from a cultural perspective and would be policed by other employees. So the lack of a culture that serves to prevent such disasters can definitely be a factor. Training is a factor as well. Looking at the United issues, there appears to be a lack of training on even the basics of customer service (in both the Dao and the dog in the overhead bin incidents, multiple staff members would have had knowledge and been able to prevent the incident, but chose not to and training might be a reason why).
A third potential contributing factor is the performance measures the company uses. If an employee is faced with a situation where there is a trade-off between customer service and some other variable, and they are measured on the other variable in their performance reviews, they will sacrifice customer service every time. A fourth factor is workload/stress. Employees who are tired, overworked or generally stressed are more likely to deliver customer service debacles.
Customer service in particular also stems from attitudes that prevail in the workplace. If the employees have an attitude oriented towards things other than customer service, they risk sacrificing service for whatever else it is. Only safety should take precedence in a service role, yet these incidents at United illustrate situations where service took a back seat to things other than safety.
There are a couple of actions that can help reduce the risk of such incidents at our company. First, there needs to be a statement of commitment to customer service as a core value. That statement needs to come from the CEO. HR can follow this up with specific examples, and prescribed behavior, but the starting point has to be that we put customer service front and center, and position it as something that the CEO is committed to – not just in words but actions as well.
The second is that I can undertake an evaluation of the workload factors – ensuring that workers are not reaching points of fatigue and stress that might diminish their decision-making, their emotional state and other factors that can contribute to customer service disasters.