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How Delta CEO Ed Bastian Just Proved That Delta Airlines Cares

This article is more than 7 years old.

Tuesday morning October 18, 2016 at around 2am I posted a blog titled “Companies don’t have to be perfect but they do need to fix it when they screw up!” In that blog I shared the story of a harrowing customer service situation I was going through with Delta Airlines. Toward the end of that blog I stated, “Having been a CEO for so many years it makes everything in me want to pick up the phone and call Delta’s CEO and say, “Do you have any idea how badly your company is doing on customer service? And do you care!?”

Well I am happy to report that today I discovered that Delta CEO Ed Bastian does care! Let me share with you the 3 ways that he proved that:

#1: It began earlier this morning when a call came in on my cell phone. I was in a Board Meeting at the time so I was unable to answer the call, however, the voicemail transcription on my Apple iPhone 7 (love that new feature Apple!) let me read the message and see that it was a call from Delta CEO Ed Bastian’s Executive Assistant, letting me know that they were trying to reach me and asking me to call back. I later tried calling back but I had to leave them a message. Then just after 5pm est today, Ed’s Executive Assistant, Susanna Curtis, called me back. She said that Ed Bastian had read my blog and wanted to reach out to me to apologize for the bad experience I had with Delta - He wanted me to know that they were wrong, and they were sorry.

Many company’s CEOs would have read a customer complaint and simply ignored it. Delta’s CEO didn’t do that. He was reaching out within a day of finding out I had a bad experience to tell me Delta cared and was sorry.

#2: Delta had spent time going over everything that happened with my booking and shared that there had indeed been a technical problem on their side that caused the problem and they wanted to me to know that their technical people were looking into the issue try and prevent a future reoccurrence.

Many companies would have covered up a mistake, or at a minimum, avoided admitting responsibility for it. In this instance, Delta didn’t do that. They admitted it and then  committed that they were taking steps to prevent it from happening again.

#3: Susanna stated that they had looked over everything that happened on my calls with their agents and they wanted me to know that they were sorry things had not been handled better. She explained that Delta does provide tools for agents to fix mistakes like this that happen but there had clearly been a training issue because those tools hadn’t been properly utilized.  She didn’t try to make excuses as to why things went wrong, rather she owned the fact that the matter should have been handled better. She let me know that she planned to meet with the executives to go over what happened in my case and that Delta would be using this example as an opportunity to teach their agents how they can improve moving forward.

Many companies would have gotten defensive and offered up excuses instead of fixes. Delta didn’t do that. They took ownership of the fact there was a training issue needing to be fixed and they gave visibility into the plan they were making to improve it. (I hope they will share The Parable of the Oranges with their employees as part of that training as I think it teaches a valuable lesson about how employees need to be approaching their jobs).

At the end of our phone call I expressed how much I appreciated that Delta took the time to call me, and even more so, I appreciated the way that Delta chose to respond to the situation - they had owned the mistake, they had fixed the mistake, and they were putting safeguards in place to try and ensure the same mistake wouldn’t be repeated again. As a customer that is exactly what I want! Every company is going to make some mistakes, but what defines that company is the way they handle those mistakes when they occur. Today Delta handled it fabulously.

Delta never once asked me to retract my negative experience I had posted in my blog, nor did Delta ask me to write about the way they fixed it. The fact is that Delta didn’t ask me to do anything at all. But I believe this story deserves to be shared – I believe that when people do the right thing, for the right reason, they deserve to be acknowledged for it. So today I want to acknowledge that Delta, under the leadership of their new CEO Ed Bastian, did the right thing (Ed was appointed CEO in May 2016). And the integrity that Susanna displayed in our conversation proves the sentiment I shared in the article “Great Employees Are Not Replaceable”.

Just as one bad customer service experience can have a tremendously negative impact on a company, companies who handle their mistakes with integrity and accountability, like Delta did today, will result in an even greater, tremendously positive impact on that company. I also believe that a company led by a CEO that cares will ultimately lead to having an entire employee base that cares….so thank you Ed Bastian for proving that Delta is awesome…I can’t wait to watch the way that Delta, under his leadership, keeps climbing from here!

~Amy Rees Anderson (follow my daily blogs at www.amyreesanderson.com/blog )