Disasters can be great customer experiences

US Airways have shown a great sense of understanding customers by making a huge effort to return the belongings of passengers on their flight that ditched into the Hudson River.

Read the story here
http://www.smh.com.au/travel/travel-news/hudson-crash-passengers-start-getting-luggage-back-20090520-bffq.html

Two things are very important:

• They didn't have to. The law says belongings only have to be returned when there fatalities. As we know thankfully there were none.
• They gave each passenger $5,000 immediately. Normally this is done by a passenger fund.

US Airways got great maedia for the Pilot 'Sully'. The saving of the passengers and the way they handled the incident at the time. They could have left it there. That would have been easy. Engaging a specialist company to retun the personal items is outstanding.

Well done US Airways.

What can we take from this?

• Every business needs a disaster recovery plan. Naturally airlines have procedures. Do you?
• Disasters can be recovered and made into CX winners.
• Thinking form the customers perspective always pays off.
• The staff will get the same warm, happy feeling as the customers when the company does the extra stuff. It also teaches new staff "That's the way we do it round here"
• Recovery opportunity happen at any point the customers trust is potentially damaged.
  

In summary; Good experiences are, most often, not an accident.