My CEO Life

Today i received an email from the CEO of Qantas apologising about the recent disruptions to their services. Initially i thought i was someone important then i realised it went to all Frequent Flyers. The good news is that this email directly addresses some of the bad press the airline has been receiving. It was good, from a customer perspective, to actually hear from the man at the top and not some PR mouth piece.

Overall this is a great example of using PR and email to directly get to those customers that really matter, the frequent flyer.  More companies should use this approach more often.  Overall, well done … not just fix the maintenance issues.

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I am writing this entry from my very expensive business class seat somewhere over the international dateline between Los Angeles and Melbourne. I tried to use Qantas’ award winning entertainment system and it didn’t work. The staff rebooted the system a few times and politely told me how this happens all the time and that they have complained to management etc … The problem was this is not the first time it has happened to me – in fact I would say that the system doesn’t work on about 50% of the flights I take.

As I didn’t have much else I could do, I got to thinking about what responsibilities to its customers a business has if it has a near monopoly position.

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