Getting Customer Service Right

I've been a fan of Southwest Airlines for years, flying them almost exclusively in my trips around the country. When American Airlines essentially abandoned St. Louis in 2009, offering far fewer nonstop flights to domestic destinations, Southwest swooped in, picked up the open gates at Terminal 2, and started carrying a lot of people to a lot of places. I like their staff, their attitude, their pricing, and their no-change-fee policy. It's a very good company that has shown time and again it knows how to treat customers right.

Here's a recent example. Last week, I got caught up in the Southwest Airlines computer problem across their system. I sat in the Dallas Love Field terminal for about 90 minutes before my flight finally got off the ground, and was happy that the delay hadn't been too long. Considering how many other people's lives had been upended by flights that were cancelled, I wasn't too upset.

Two days later, I received an email from Southwest apologizing for the inconvenience and offering a 50% discount off my next flight. I assume that the airline sent the same email to everyone else affected by the outage. Coincidentally, I'm planning a return to Vegas later this year and hadn't booked the flight yet, so I went to Southwest's website, inserted the promo code, and 2 minutes later, I was all set -- at half the price.

That's the kind of customer service I'm talking about.