Category Archives: Southwest Airlines

Team members always reflect your brand in great service companies

The way team members behave, how they are attired and the way they speak should reflect a consistent brand message. Please don’t be mistaken. This does not mean that staff become robotic in their behaviour and appearance (unless that is a deliberate aspect of the brand strategy for the organisation).
Southwest Airlines are a terrific example of brand management. Their people, irrespective of role truly reflect the spirit of freedom in the way they perform their jobs. Southwest staff have fun on the job and the enjoyment positively infects their customers. In addition the way that the staff are treated by the organisation demonstrates that staff come first.
At Southwest pilots are renowned for helping ground crew load and unload baggage from their planes. Why? Fast turnaround times are key to Southwest’s service and profitability, and the pilots no it and support the practice of doing what needs to be done (safely and in a fun way when appropriate) to achieve great service.
The customer is not always right. Employees, not customers, come first… “The customer is sometimes wrong. We don’t carry those sorts of customers. We write to them and say, ‘Fly somebody else. Don’t abuse our people’” (Herb Kelleher, CEO Southwest Airlines, quoted in (Freiberg et al., 1996 p.268)

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