How to Improve the airlines?

Most of us would agree that if we were to vote on an industry that companies should not be used as a model to emulate, the airline industry must be at or near the top of the list. The area is very popular as a poster child for disappointing customers or infuriate many ways that do not have time or space to list them.

Now the aviation sector is at the end of "summer travel" and it seems that the powers that be are working hard to develop plans to improve their customer service many problems before their next peak period, Thanksgiving, rolls around. And 'this effort to improve that I'm writing, because every business can improve their customer service.

Rather than stand back and accept the fact that a system overload is overwhelmed every time there is a thunderstorm, it is working to add capacity, development of options, and rethink their processes.

The starting point of this effort, metrics, measuring and documenting problems. How much luggage is lost at each airport? How many flights were fully booked? Where were delayed flights because the planes lined up at the gates full? After accumulating and, hopefully, an understanding of this data becomes the effort to determine what can be done on any given issue, which will be responsible for planning, who plans to implement to reduce delay, increase accuracy, and improve overall performance .

Every company has to deal with the same problems. Many times we do very little and only disappoint our customers. They lack the competition and you never know why, because few organizations to gather metrics and try to understand the depth of the problem.

So I suggest we all look at the customer service issues and start measuring them. Create metrics on the number of times the phone rings before it answers to the number of times that a shipment is late. Start the development of methods to reduce the delay, increasing accuracy and improving overall performance. Perhaps we all learn something good from the airlines, as they rush to improve before Thanksgiving. Me? I'm going home like my turkey in the month of November ....