First of all, if you got this story from anywhere else than smodcast.com, you haven't heard the whole story. Mr. Smith is clearly justified in dragging the Southwest name through the mud if you consider both what happened to him AND the girl who he sat next to on his eventual flight home.
Now Linda, it's clear that you are at least trying harder than the first attempt at "apologizing" but you still fail abysmally, because A: you have yet to answer his question, "who's responsible for this error?" He wants the name of that person and you should give it to him. And B: you "stand by your 25 year policy."
Linda, there is only one way to make good on this. "Hi, we are Southwest airlines, and we f***ed up bad. It was due to the incompetence of our organization that this happened, and we appreciate Mr. Smith's assistance in pointing out some severe flaws in the way our employees relate to our paying customers. We will be in touch with Mr. Smith regarding the retraining/replacement of our employees."
THEN, you find that girl on his last flight. You issue her a formal apology(private, she's suffered enough public embarrassment), you make sure that Mr. Smith knows about it, and then of course he'll tell the world via twitter and blogs. And you comp her A WHOLE BUNCH of free stuff. If it isn't clear to you by now that he's doing this campaign for her benefit and for all others that have been NEEDLESSLY insulted by your airline, NOT for himself, then you are an extremely stupid person.
Even though he's tired of talking about it, he says on his blog that he'd rather pay for his tickets than have southwest comp all of them. Doesn't that say anything to you? If he'd accepted your apology, then he would have accepted the comps. The fact that he hasn't should be a clear indicator that your "apology", in his opinion, was lacking, and he planned to continue personally boycotting your product. And from the looks of the comments on this post, and on Twitter, enough people are going to do likewise that it could potentially hurt your business. You aren't even close to cleaning this up.
You have to get Kevin Smith to publicly say that you guys have done right by him, or your screwed. Humility is the only way to do that. YOU HAVE TO FALL ON YOUR SWORD. Screw your badly enforced(and unclearly written) policy, screw your politically correct BS. Be human. Show decency. "We f***ed up, this should never have happened, we apologize deeply to Mr. Smith, we ALSO apologize personally to the young woman(name not mentioned) and have reached out to her to retain her as a faithful customer(i.e. comped her a bunch). We apologize to anyone else we've offended, and we are working on improving our operations so this doesn't happen NEEDLESSLY in the future."
Fall-on-your-sword. That's the only thing you can do that has ANY HOPE of changing the minds of the many that have written you off over this. If you don't do this, you deserve what you get. I hope he goes on Larry King or some such. If he gets a platform greater than his smodcast/twitter fans, and he tells his WHOLE side of the story, then you guys are screwed. And I'm gonna laugh.
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First of all, if you got this story from anywhere else than smodcast.com, you haven't heard the whole story. Mr. Smith is clearly justified in dragging the Southwest name through the mud if you consider both what happened to him AND the girl who he sat next to on his eventual flight home.
Now Linda, it's clear that you are at least trying harder than the first attempt at "apologizing" but you still fail abysmally, because A: you have yet to answer his question, "who's responsible for this error?" He wants the name of that person and you should give it to him. And B: you "stand by your 25 year policy."
Linda, there is only one way to make good on this. "Hi, we are Southwest airlines, and we f***ed up bad. It was due to the incompetence of our organization that this happened, and we appreciate Mr. Smith's assistance in pointing out some severe flaws in the way our employees relate to our paying customers. We will be in touch with Mr. Smith regarding the retraining/replacement of our employees."
THEN, you find that girl on his last flight. You issue her a formal apology(private, she's suffered enough public embarrassment), you make sure that Mr. Smith knows about it, and then of course he'll tell the world via twitter and blogs. And you comp her A WHOLE BUNCH of free stuff. If it isn't clear to you by now that he's doing this campaign for her benefit and for all others that have been NEEDLESSLY insulted by your airline, NOT for himself, then you are an extremely stupid person.
Even though he's tired of talking about it, he says on his blog that he'd rather pay for his tickets than have southwest comp all of them. Doesn't that say anything to you? If he'd accepted your apology, then he would have accepted the comps. The fact that he hasn't should be a clear indicator that your "apology", in his opinion, was lacking, and he planned to continue personally boycotting your product. And from the looks of the comments on this post, and on Twitter, enough people are going to do likewise that it could potentially hurt your business. You aren't even close to cleaning this up.
You have to get Kevin Smith to publicly say that you guys have done right by him, or your screwed. Humility is the only way to do that. YOU HAVE TO FALL ON YOUR SWORD. Screw your badly enforced(and unclearly written) policy, screw your politically correct BS. Be human. Show decency. "We f***ed up, this should never have happened, we apologize deeply to Mr. Smith, we ALSO apologize personally to the young woman(name not mentioned) and have reached out to her to retain her as a faithful customer(i.e. comped her a bunch). We apologize to anyone else we've offended, and we are working on improving our operations so this doesn't happen NEEDLESSLY in the future."
Fall-on-your-sword. That's the only thing you can do that has ANY HOPE of changing the minds of the many that have written you off over this. If you don't do this, you deserve what you get. I hope he goes on Larry King or some such. If he gets a platform greater than his smodcast/twitter fans, and he tells his WHOLE side of the story, then you guys are screwed. And I'm gonna laugh.
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"This has our attention, and we will be reviewing how and when this delicate policy is implemented." How about when a paying customer fits in the seat, you don't implement the policy, because it doesn't apply! No wonder you guys are in this situation if this is the level of geniuses you got working there.
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