Southwest Airlines finds a borderline crazy way to (lastly) delight customers

I’m very enthusiastic about Southwest Airlines.

Suddenly.

No, critically.

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It’s been far too tempting to be a contact vital in regards to the enormously unconscionable method by which it handled its customers over the Christmas interval.

Somehow, Southwest itself made it ever extra tempting to be vital by presenting arguments that had been, at their coronary heart, unhappy, self-defensive wind.

But now, every part is altering. Can you are feeling it? I can really feel it. A mild breeze is blowing and it is rising from the minds and mouths of Southwest.

Just take a look at among the very latest developments.

Southwest has simply employed a software program firm referred to as SureWeather to make sure the climate by no means impacts a single Southwest flight ever once more.

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I apologize. That was simply my pleasure. SureWeather, actually, guarantees: “One simple interface. A wide range of innovative deicing solutions at your fingertips.”

The firm boasts: “Over 70 global airlines currently implement holdover times and other creative solutions on the flight deck using our platform.”

This could incite one or two Southwest customers to marvel: “Why was Southwest not one of these companies before?” But cease it, we’re being optimistic right here. We’re being positively excited.

So please let me recommend that SureWeather have to be fairly good. Why, United Airlines already employs it and the airline just lately went out of its way to create a Super Bowl mocking Southwest’s lack of ability to address the climate in Denver.

This, although, is just the start of the thrill. I promise.

Reuters stories that Southwest can also be upgrading its crew scheduling software program. Some customers could have thought the airline had little or no crew scheduling software program — or, at the very least, little or no that works effectively sufficient — because it appeared Southwest had no way of realizing the place lots of its pilots and crew had been in the course of the December debacle.

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But there was another factor in Southwest’s newest bulletins that will transfer some customers to paroxysms of pleasure.

Southwest says it is going to rent extra folks. Yes, precise human folks. Their process? To do one thing actually radical: Answer the cellphone when customers name.

It’s fairly mad, is not it? The mere concept that a human can clear up your drawback extra rapidly than a machine is, effectively, revolutionary. It appears that people nonetheless suppose extra like people than AI does. Though after all the hole is narrowing.

Somehow, then, Southwest has concluded that it wants extra people readily available when customers are on their final kilojoule of endurance.

It’s straightforward to be aghast, is not it? It’s tempting to think about that Southwest will once more (lastly?) present customers the, um, love for which the airline has been lengthy recognized.

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So I’m very excited. I would like you to be very excited, too.

But you have suffered a lot currently, so I really feel duty-bound to whisper one small factor: Where are they going to get these new folks from? 

How are they going to practice them? How a lot will they pay them? And, dare I additionally point out, Southwest is at the moment one of many much less completely happy airways on the whole. Both its pilots and its flight attendants rail towards the airline for not providing them a new contract.

Enough of that. Let’s rejoice.

Southwest is aware of it wants extra people so as to supply a extra human service, whereas it upgrades its know-how to deal with its pilots and cabin crew extra like, effectively, people.

Don’t you simply like it?