COVID-19: For Airlines, It Is Time To Give Nothing Less Than Their Best

As with every other major crisis facing the world, whether a global war or a pandemic, humanity prevails through unity, empathy, responsibility, and leadership. Tactical and momentary actions alone will not be enough, because we have to be prepared for a sustained period of strife. Governments and private sector organizations have a shared responsibility to collaborate, setting aside differences, and look beyond their individual stakes. Here is a mix of strategic recommendations specifically for airline executives and customer experience pros:

1. Focus on reverse loyalty. It means an airline’s loyalty to . . . passengers, staff, partners. Especially during a crisis such as this, the question of loyalty — but in the opposite direction — will come to the fore. This is the best time to earn loyalty, and it is the worst time to lose it. Only a short-minded strategy would concentrate all the effort on survival and neglect its subsequent recovery and growth.
2. Use this time to create differentiation. After the crisis ends — and it will end — the market landscape will be different, and some of its current participants may not be there. How will your organization enter that post-COVID-19 world? As someone that carries a certain pride for what your organization did for its customers, employees, and partners during the crisis, or as someone who managed to stay afloat by getting a loan?
3. Learn from this pandemic and develop new working habits for the long term. This pandemic is teaching us all a lesson about how to be safer, more disciplined, more socially responsible, more adept, more collaborative, and more respectful to others and to complain less. This is a brilliant mix of traits that if concocted into a special pill would make a great vaccine against terrible corporate cultures that stifle the workplace. Absorb these habits!
4. Embrace new processes and technologies. The term “digital transformation” just got a big boost. Organizations are learning what it will be like if they had the ability to deploy processes and technologies that allow cross-border, real-time, remote data access and team collaboration, nonstop, 24x7x365, with almost no down time and end-to-end capability to identify and solve virtually every problem on the fly. This doesn’t sound so futuristic at all now. Post-COVID-19, this is another thing that will help organizations to excel at what they do…