Recently I took a round trip flight for a business trip. Everything was going smoothly until my meetings were quite successful and I was done a day earlier than I expected. It was then that my trouble and a great example of how empowering your employees to do the right thing came into play.

I called the airline toll free customer service line to make sure seats were available and to see if there was any fare change. I was in luck since the plane was less than half full and the fare code was the same. I was told that there would be a $50 change fee that they would occasionally waive at the airport. So far so good. I arrived at the airport about two hours early and attempted to check in and that’s when service and common sense went out the window due to a very rigid policy and procedure manual. I was told that the $50 fee I was quoted would actually be $150 since I was flying on a different day than my original ticket. It didn’t matter that the fare code was the same. It didn’t matter that my original flight was sold out the next day and by me giving up my seat the airline would now have an opportunity to sell that seat pocketing as much as $500 for another customer that needed a seat on sold out flight. What mattered was it was company policy to charge $150 for a change of days. Since I was the only one at the ticket counter, I had the attention of 3 airline employees including a supervisor. I could tell they wanted to help me but they told me that company policy prevented them from doing so. How crazy is that?

Since we all had time to kill (It’s just not that busy at the  Colorado Springs airport), we had a 20 minute discussion about what policies they would change and how they had very little power to make decisions to improve the customer experience or to benefit the company financially.  The employees all agreed that I should be charged a nominal fee that represented enough revenue to cover the labor involved to change my reservation. Since the change takes about 5 minutes at the most, a $25 – $50 fee was considered fair which I don’t disagree with. The companies also understood the fact that I was doing the airline a favor by leaving a day earlier since I was taking a seat on a plane today that wasn’t going to be sold out thereby freeing up a seat for the next day that would probably be sold for a premium of between $250 – $500 thereby making another customer happy and creating new revenue for the airline. It was a true win-win-win situation that was against company policy.

After our conversation it was abundantly clear that these employees were frustrated by the policies as was I. If airline management saw first-hand how these policies negatively impacted customer service, operations and revenues, they would surely change these inflexible policies and would instead empower employees to do the right thing.

A better policy would allow an employee to make a judgment call if there was justification for the change. Require documentation if you must or have two employees review and sign off on the issue but don’t have an inflexible policy. Imagine how different my scenario would have been had the airline employee had flexibility to improve the customer experience and make the airline more money? Implementing this change in policy would be simple with some common sense.

Great companies large and small have policies that empower their employees to do the right thing. Does your company empower its employees or do you have a policy that prevents your team from making more money for the company and providing second rate customer service?

Not that it’s a surprise but the airline I am talking about is USAir. After my lengthy discussion with the friendly employees at the ticket counter, they all agreed to charge me just $50 and free up a seat the next day for a new customer. They did this at the risk of being fired for a rigid policy. Why a company would threaten to fire employees for improving the customer experience and making the airline money is beyond me. Perhaps this is just one reason the airline industry and USAir specificially is in the condition it is.