Read Online The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership by Richard Branson - Free Book Online Page B

available to take your call.’ She then kept me hanging on for what seemed like an eternity – it was probably a couple of minutes – before coming back on the line to say, ‘Sorry, Richard, but you appear to be out of the office at the moment, can someone else help you?’ before dissolving into howls of laughter. But give it a shot – I am sure you’ll be able to make a much better job of it than I did.
    I had greater success on the phone when I was based full-time in the UK and used to frequently cold-call Virgin Atlantic passengers who had just arrived at Heathrow. Our Upper Class (business class) passengers could easily be tracked down on their way into London as they were in the limos we had supplied for them. The drivers were primed to expect this and to simply pass the phone back saying, ‘It’s a call for you, sir/madam.’ Needless to say they were surprised at getting a call and so would usually start out with a very suspicious, ‘Hello, who’s this?’, to which I’d typically answer with a cheery, ‘Hello, this is Richard Branson, I’m just calling to welcome you to England and ask if everything went well on the flight.’ Needless to say I got a lot of ‘Yeah, sure it is! Who is this really?’ -type reactions (some in much less printable language) but when we did finally strike up a conversation it was always time incredibly well spent on my part. Complaints, or ‘observations’ as I prefer to call them, are usually unsolicited and with too many companies not particularly welcome, so a senior person reaching out and inviting honest input really wins a lot of points as well as bringing in some interesting insights.
    In the case of my calls to the limos, the results were almost always a win–win–win. The passenger was impressed that I’d made the effort to contact them, I got a lot of excellent hot-off-the-press feedback that I could immediately address with the airline and I was also able to pass along any specific compliments to the cabin crew or airport staff, who were never that surprised to take my calls. It was also a great way to say thank you to our most frequent fliers. I liked to be tipped off when a passenger was going through milestones, like say 100,000 miles, and would call to congratulate them and say how much we appreciate their loyalty. A little ‘thank you’ goes a long way.
    I have always found it to be one of the more intriguing idiosyncrasies of the human condition that a problem that is handled quickly and effectively will almost always serve to generate more long-term customer loyalty than when the original service was delivered satisfactorily. That said, I am a huge believer in the old customer service mantra of, ‘First to know, first to handle.’ If someone can fix a problem on the spot it saves all kinds of angst for the customer plus time and expense for the company – just as importantly, an on-the-spot resolution more often than not will also keep a customer in the fold.
    Call it leadership in reverse if you like, but any company that views their business’s level of performance strictly through the optic of the bottom line is living very dangerously. That kind of blinkered ‘view from the boardroom’ thinking was what cost Steve Jobs his job at Apple and history very quickly showed where that took the company – almost to the point of extinction. So rather than sitting in a gilded cage believing what the financials and customer surveys seem to indicate, effective leaders have got to set an example and get out there kicking the tyres on a regular basis. I am probably one of the biggest (constructive) critics of every Virgin company, always balanced with praise where appropriate, of course. Whenever I experience our services, as good and trendsetting as they might be, there is nearly always a way to improve upon them. Yes, I can sometimes be accused of nit-picking when I travel with my notebook in hand but it’s invariably the small details that combine to