Now that we are part of an amazing roll-up that makes us the largest company in the world that creates solutions by mining text – it is a great time to start to blog. Up until April 8th, I was the CEO of Attensity, now the General Manager of Attensity Americas, an Attensity Group Company. We are now world wide, parse in multiple languages and have the backing of one of the world’s largest private equity companies. It is all good, with a really neat future ahead of us. Ah, but enough about us!
Don’t you just love it when you buy a product or service from someone who obviously loves his or her job? I do; in fact my wife calls me the world’s biggest sucker for a really good salesperson, and I probably am. That is one of the reasons I love flying JetBlue. Everyone sells. A while ago, I was in their Kennedy hub waiting for a connecting flight that was a bit delayed. The gate agent got on the PA system and said, “Hi everyone! For all of you waiting for flight xxx, I have good news and I have bad news for you – what would you like first? (After everyone yelled out ‘the bad news first’) OK, here is the bad news, our flight is about 20 minutes late due to weather coming into New York, but we are doing everything we can to get you back on schedule anyway, and our pilot will work hard to make up any delay on the next leg. But now for the good news, I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night!”
Everyone cracked up and cheered and somehow the delay wasn’t so bad after all. JetBlue happens to be a customer of ours and tells us that their ability to listen carefully to the Voice of the Customer has taught them a lot about keeping and retaining customers. They even train their folks on how to be nice as a result, and have found that positive daily interactions with their employees is the single largest factor in repeat business. Contrast this with your last delayed flight where it was really tough to find out what exactly was going on, how long the delay would be, and everyone sat around with a glum look on their faces. Everyone claims to care about their customers; JetBlue is a true practitioner. Pretty cool. When is the last time that you had a memorable customer experience like this?
