Jetstar Redemption — from NEVER AGAIN to WOW in one phone call
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Jetstar Redemption — from NEVER AGAIN to WOW in one phone call. By Paul Dunn

Last month, I seriously ‘pasted’ Jetstar.

Today, I want to praise them.

And it has nothing to do with (or does it!) the way they fly their planes, their people behind the counter, the baggage handlers, the pilots, the Flight Attendants or indeed the meals on board.

It has to do with one lady — Abbie. And I’ve never met her.

But without doing anything, other than listening, she’s connected me with Jetstar in a way I’ve never been connected before.

One hour ago, I got a phone call. Here’s how it began:

“Hello Mr. Dunn, thank you for taking my call. The CEO of Jetstar, Bruce Buchanan, has asked me to give you a call — it’s about the blog you wrote about us. Oh, my name’s Abbie one of the Customer Care Analysts at Jetstar and Mr. Buchanan was wondering if you could take some time just to go a little deeper on your experiences so we can learn something about what’s happened and take steps to put it right. Mr. Buchanan has asked me to take lots of notes so if that’s OK, Mr. Dunn, can we take that time now?”

How disarming is that? When I first heard Abbie mention ‘Jetstar’ I was half-expecting she’d say ….. ‘from the Jetstar legal department’!

Crucially, really crucially, during the 50 minutes — yes — 50 full minutes we were on the call, Abbie never once ‘justified’ anything or attempted to say ‘well, the reason that happened was …..’.

Instead each time I spoke it was either:

‘Oh, I’m so sorry that was your experience ..’

or

“Hmmm, please tell me some more about that’

or

“So let me just check Mr. Dunn so that I’m clear — you’re saying it’s a cultural thing. And it would be great if, like the other airlines you’ve mentioned, we started referring to and thinking of passengers NOT as passengers or even customers but as ‘guests’.

Oh yes, we went very, very deep. Even too …

‘So Mr. Dunn, you’re saying that a lot of our people at the airline counters need to really be aware of their grooming. And tell me, Mr. Dunn, I notice you spend a lot of time in Singapore so is that your experience with us in Asia or is that in our Australian operations?

Abbie was great — a great voice — soft most times. But ‘bouncy’, carrying the conversation nicely along. And at the end of it, I almost wanted to step on a Jetstar plane there and then.

Abbie stressed all along that she was just one of a team of people committed to listening and making the airline great. And just a minute ago, I received a fax from Abbie’s boss, Michael, the head of Customer Care.

Amongst other things Michael tells me that Abbie ‘has taken detailed notes of your conversation and the feedback you’ve provided. This information will be passed on directly to Bruce Buchanan, our Chief Executive Officer.’

Cool stuff. And how cool is it that Jetstar actively found the original piece out there in Cyberspace.

I hope there’ll find this one too and give Abbie a gold star or whatever it takes to have others recognise the value of what she did.

Maybe there’s more to come …. stay tuned.

ABOUT THE COLUMNIST

Paul Dunn is now known worldwide as the ‘Wizard of WOW’. He’s a best-selling author, a creator of successful international businesses and his audio and video programs are now in use by over 156,000 businesses around the world. He is passionate about giving back to Social Causes to increase the level of joy in our world. He serves as Chairman of the revolutionary Buy1GIVE1 (www.b1g1.com). He gets up every morning to, as he puts it, ‘give businesses the power to change our lives.’

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