If you've been in business for awhile, you'll have experienced occasions when everything goes wrong. Despite your best efforts, circumstances beyond your control conspire and some of your customers have a bad experience.

What do you do? Bury your head in the sand? Leave the country for a couple of weeks? Change your phone number?

Well, you could, but that won't solve the problem.

Earlier this year, one of the most popular airlines in the USA, JetBlue faced such a dilemma, and we can learn a lot from how they dealt with it.

What happened? Well, there were some major weather problems which had a knock on effect at JFK airport in New York, until the airline experienced a major melt-down.

Many hundreds of passengers were stuck on airplanes for as long as 11 hours, without going anywhere. And apparently the subsequent effects continued to be felt for about a week, with countless flights badly affected.

The news media latched onto the story like a bulldog and they wouldn't let go. That meant that the airlines woes were VERY high profile.

What did they do?

The passengers who were stuck on planes for many hours on the ground were in constant communication with the captain of the plane, who kept them fully informed. Also, when it was clear that the problem was serious, they were immediately informed that they'd receive a full refund of the price of their tickets PLUS a free round-trip ticket for future travel on the airline. It's worth noting that that gesture went far beyond their legal obligation, most airlines won't do anything for you under similar circumstances surprisingly enough.

Also worthy of imitation was the companies swift email response to their entire customer database. They didn't shy away from the issues or try to cast blame on other factors (like most airlines do), but they took full responsibility for the shambles that had occurred, and promised to implement immediate drastic changes to try and prevent it from happening again.

JetBlue also gave specific information. They didn't try to blind customers with jargon or airline industry lingo in the hopes of trying to confuse passengers, but rather they openly talked about the circumstances that led up to the delays, and explained how they had already hired more staff to cope better in the future.

The email from the airlines CEO, David Neelman, started with:

“We are sorry and embarrassed. But most of all, we are deeply sorry.”

What an unusually frank and honest response! No passing of the buck, no excuses. They took full responsibility AND said sorry.

I have a lot of respect for JetBlue for their actions during this period, and personally I'm still happy to fly with them. Their honest response and apology was appreciated by their customers because they've not experienced any major fallout from that incident, or since.

The lessons here should be obvious to you. When things go wrong, customers don't care who's to blame, and it really shouldn't matter. If it was a supplier, take the issue up with them, but don't get the customer involved.

Don't fall into the trap of casting blame anywhere but at your own doorstep. Ensure that your employees have the same mindset, too. Everyone needs to be attuned to taking responsibility and wanting to fix it when something goes wrong.

When you make a genuine apology and fix the mistake, customers appreciate it. Sometimes, they become more loyal because they saw how you treated them.

Like all businesses, we screw up from time to time. But we do try and adopt the attitude that every customer is important to us, we will take responsibility for our mistakes, and we will make it right. I encourage you to do the same.
And don't just deal with the symptoms, fix the root cause of a problem whenever possible to prevent the same thing happening again.

Customers are generally very tolerant of mistakes, but they can't be expected to tolerate the same mistake over and over again.

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