http://blog.getsatisfaction.com/2007/02/26/scott-berkun-southwest-airlines-and-putting-customer-service-second/ The Get Satisfaction blog Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:48:49 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.5 hourly 1 http://blog.getsatisfaction.com/2007/02/26/scott-berkun-southwest-airlines-and-putting-customer-service-second/comment-page-1/#comment-141 Is the customer always right? at Demand Satisfaction! Wed, 28 Feb 2007 20:35:30 +0000 http://blog.getsatisfaction.com/2007/02/26/scott-berkun-southwest-airlines-and-putting-customer-service-second/#comment-141 [...] The phrase, made popular by 19th Century department store magnates, Marshall Field and Harry Gordon Selfridge , was merely a marketing tactic. It’s designed to imply that store employees are in a position of virtual servitude to the customer. With this mandate an employee should never speak out of turn or–gasp!–actually disagree with a customer, even if the customer is wrong or out of line. Despite the propaganda, this is no recipe for empowering employees to serve customers to their fullest abilities. Southwest Airlines, by contrast, gets consistently spectacular results by putting customers second. [...] [...] The phrase, made popular by 19th Century department store magnates, Marshall Field and Harry Gordon Selfridge , was merely a marketing tactic. It’s designed to imply that store employees are in a position of virtual servitude to the customer. With this mandate an employee should never speak out of turn or–gasp!–actually disagree with a customer, even if the customer is wrong or out of line. Despite the propaganda, this is no recipe for empowering employees to serve customers to their fullest abilities. Southwest Airlines, by contrast, gets consistently spectacular results by putting customers second. [...]

]]> http://blog.getsatisfaction.com/2007/02/26/scott-berkun-southwest-airlines-and-putting-customer-service-second/comment-page-1/#comment-139 What I’ve Learned So Far » Blog Archive » Your own employees are your most important customers. Tue, 27 Feb 2007 18:07:49 +0000 http://blog.getsatisfaction.com/2007/02/26/scott-berkun-southwest-airlines-and-putting-customer-service-second/#comment-139 [...] Check out this from my old schoolmate Lane:  Scott Berkun, Southwest Airlines, and putting customer service second So much of what drew me to the Web when I first started working on it over a decade ago was the culture of the place. The companies I worked for, just like the Internet itself, were thoroughly and genuinely bottom-up. Good ideas could and did come from the top or the bottom of the hierarchy. Iconoclastic thinking was encouraged, not repressed. Failure was openly acknowledged, even espoused as a goal, not because the people in charge wanted to see you fail but because because being told it was ok to fail made it ok to try. [...] [...] Check out this from my old schoolmate Lane:  Scott Berkun, Southwest Airlines, and putting customer service second So much of what drew me to the Web when I first started working on it over a decade ago was the culture of the place. The companies I worked for, just like the Internet itself, were thoroughly and genuinely bottom-up. Good ideas could and did come from the top or the bottom of the hierarchy. Iconoclastic thinking was encouraged, not repressed. Failure was openly acknowledged, even espoused as a goal, not because the people in charge wanted to see you fail but because because being told it was ok to fail made it ok to try. [...]

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