1. An introduction of the complex problem
In the case scenario, the main problem is the failure of the United Airlines employees to observe customer conduct towards Dr. Dao. The security officers dragged off Dr. Dao from his seat, and this led to injuries and bruises on his face. The indecent behavior from the security officers was also followed by undue compensation to the client. The cause of the chaos on the plane was caused by overbooking, and Dr. Dao was unwilling to offer his seat voluntarily to the other customers. However, United Airlines has taken full responsibility for what happened.
In the case scenario, the main problem was caused by the failure of the company crew and security officers to respect Dr. Dao as a customer of the company. The company had made overbooking for four seats and required customers that could volunteer their seats for the others. The crew approached a couple that was willing to volunteer their seats, but Dr. Dao refused. The crew called in the manager who failed to persuade Dr. Dao, and later the security officers opted to use force on the customer. The company has however taken responsibility for the chaos and reached an amicable agreement with Dr. Dao.
● The main elements that contributed to the problem were the inability of the employees to respect the values of the customers. The other causal agent was the inability of the management to organize better mechanisms that the employees will use to handle the passengers in case of overbooking. The company lacked an outlined compensation scheme on volunteer passengers during overbookings. The company should also have organized their operations and help the agents to understand the number of passengers to avoid overbookings. The employees lacked training on how to persuade passengers to accept an offer and volunteer their seats for others.
2. Explanation of the concepts and frameworks that we are going to use to analyse the case.
As we go deeper into the case to figure out the hidden causes of compulsory removal of passenger Dr. David Dao which mentioned above, we couldn’t help ourselves but picking up the United Airlines’ flurry crisis management as worldwide airline service provider. Then we approached the case with 3 different perspectives in the framework: Strategic Design, Political, and Cultural, in analyzing organizational problem.
● Strategic design
“Contract Of Carriage” (COC), a legal contract for all commercial airlines along with the federal rule [14 CFR 253] is the designated procedures that United Airlines has to work with as a guideline related with crisis management. COC delivers that “a passenger may only be bumped from a flight before they board,Rule 25[Denied Boarding Compensation]. After they have taken their seat, Rule 21 [Refusal of Transport] is in effect, which would allow security to forcibly remove the passenger for many reasons — none of which includes accommodating last minute needs for a seat for other airline employees (or even overbooking).” Furthermore, the overbooking system which has been considered as a conventional method for airlines to protect themselves from the significant unexpected loss of no-shows since 1940s is the another process issue directly related to the case. “
● Political
As we learned, the action speaks for the outcome of power. United Airlines ended up with fatal loss of market value and customers due to the lack of power in dealing with the crisis at the scene. The Irrational decision made by United Airlines can be translated into the non-existence or lack of authority in operation.
● Cultural
The cultural element in the framework determines the members behaviors and the perception of the world. The culture we are mentioning here will be turned out as norm and behaviors based on values/attitudes and beliefs/ assumption. The crews’ disrespectful behaviors shown in this shock video are established based on the United Airlines’ shared company values and attitude.
3. A clear analysis of the problem that incorporate the theoretical concepts
For the analysis of the problem, we are going to break it in different parts, to try to discover all the things that went wrong that day, to try to avoid this kind of problems in the future and all the consequences that followed this day that damaged the image of the brand and the company.
To have a better understanding, were are going to break them in chronological order, to have a better understanding of the situation.
The first part of the problem was the lack of planning of the company. They had 4 people of their crew in Chicago and they needed them to go to Louisville in order to operate a flight from that city. The problem was that those 4 people were crucial in that moment in Louisville, because one of the flights of United was programmed to flight from the city next day, and not having that crew in the airport wouldn’t allow that flight to operate.
That would mean that the flight would be cancelled, and because of that, more than 140 people wouldn’t be able to flight, creating a big problem for them.
This lack of planning made them to book the seats for the crew while the passengers of an overbooked flight were boarding. So when the crew arrived to the door, all the passengers were already sitting in their seats with the airplane full. And having all the passengers already is a really big problem, because it is much more difficult to try to convince a passenger that is already sitting in the seat to give up and change his flight for another one that to one that is not already in the plane. So the timing in this problem was crucial and lead to a worse scenario that it could be at the beginning.
The second part was the overbooking problem. Overbook a flight is a common practice in aviation and it’s allowed by law. This flight was operated in the USA and the rules of aviation allow to overbook flights. But being a common and legal practice doesn’t prevent it to cause troubles. In this case, the overbooking in the flight made more difficult the situation, because of the lack of free space in the plane for the crew, and because the people already knew the situation of the overbooking so they had a more resilient attitude against the company in order to give in their seats in that flight.
The third part of the problem was when the crew arrived to the gate, to try to board, the company started to offer different compensations to the passengers in order to have free seats. If the volunteered for leave the plane and fight another day, they would receive a compensation for that. The problem is that they started with one compensation, and when it didn’t work they offered more, but the second time it didn’t work either, so they stopped trying to increase the offer in order to make a passenger change his mind and stay in Chicago to have the last free seat that they needed.
And the problem not was only that they stopped increasing the amount of money that they offered to the passenger, but they didn’t offer any transportation or destination options to the passengers, making the idea of giving the seat to the crew of United Airlines a less attractive situation for the current passengers.
The main problem of this lack appeal to the offer is that agents of United Airlines do not have the authority to act independently to offer high levels of compensation to the passengers in extreme situations like the one which we are analyzing, and they don’t have either the power to provide other modes of transportation for the passengers. So because of these policies of the company, the group personnel of the airline, wasn’t able to make a better offer to the passengers in order to try to solve the problem.
After the problem of offering a compensation to the passengers, and don't be able to have the last seat that they needed to their crew, United Airlines decided to deboard one of the passengers. It’s not really clear the way that they choose the passengers, but it is a mix of the fare paid for the ticked, if they have status on the airline, time of check-in and a few more variables. When the passenger was chosen for the airline, they communicated the decision, in this case was the person involved in the incident. This passenger didn’t received the decision with good eyes, and he refused to reboard the plane. He excused him saying that he is a doctor and he needed to be in the destiny next day because of appointments with different patients.
The problem comes here because the employees of United Airlines are not well training to manage this kind of situations, so they weren’t able to try to solve it in another way or try to convince the passenger or being more persuasive with him. The problem here is that United does not provide regular training to their employees to deal with this kind of situations, and when a passenger is denied to board a plane or they have to deal with their interactions during difficult situations, they are not capable to behave in the best possible way to handle it.
So this lack of training to the United Airlines staff during hard or difficult situations, made the staff unable to handle the situation on their own, so because of that, the next part of the problem started. They called law enforcement, so they introduced a new part in this problem. And the important part here was that the law enforcement doesn’t depend on United, so they are not able to manage it, and they are not responsible of their behavior.
Having the law enforcement people in the plane, makes the situation more drastic and it’s easier to loose the control of the situation, like in this occasion. And losing the control leads to causes that don’t represent the company, the values, culture or rules but it still affect it as it was the company the one which makes the behavior. Employees of United Airlines are suppose to handle the situations and only call law enforcement to act when it’s a risky situation that could lead to a non safety scenario.
Finally, in part because the situation was out of control, and because more parts were involved (law enforcement from Chicago Airport), to control the situation and make the passenger to de board the plane, the security forces used more force than they should, hurting the passenger and making being worse the situation at the end.
Analyzing the cognitive traps, to have a deeper understanding of the situation and what made United Airlines have to deal with this complex problem who lead to a really bad situation for the company, we find out that when they were dealing with the problem, they commit two big mistakes.
The first one was self interest, because knowing that the passenger has paid for the ticket, they were just thinking about their own employees, and not about the customers. They received a lot of criticism because of this reason. The problem of this statement is that it’s not really accurate. That’s why we are speaking about a complex problem. Because they were thinking about the crew and not the passengers that were in the flight, but the final reason to make this decision was in order to operate on flight that was suppose to take off from the destiny airport. So having to de board that passenger would mean that more than 150 passengers could flight next day, so it wasn’t completely because self interest, but that was the way that it was perceived by the public and general opinion.
The other trap that the incur was overconfidence, and in this case it was the principal trap that make a situation of a small problem in a big PR crisis for the company. The problem here was that when United took the decision of send the crew in the overbooked plane, they didn’t think about the variables that could happen in that decision. They just assumed that because is a decision of the company, the passengers will accept that decision and will take the small reward that they were offering.
But it turned out that the passenger didn’t reacted as they expected, and because they weren’t ready for another scenario, they weren’t able to react to the problem and fix the situation in a better way, committing a series of mistakes that we saw at the beginning that leads to one of their biggest PR disasters in the last years.
4. Proposal of solutions to the problem
After all this incident, United Airlines took all responsibility of what happened and it was the least they could do for taking big-bet decisions when they were facing this unexpected event.
Even though it was a bad decision from the company’s side they had to deal with the results of its actions, it was a problem that wasn’t stay silent, in other words nowadays is not just the fact or not knowing how to handle difficult situations, it’s what’s coming next when you have on board 600 witnesses willing to capture the moment and publicize it to the world.
Understanding that this is a big customer relationship issue, United Airlines has to rethink and rebuild its strategy if it wants to succeed and have positive results. Customers don’t forget, therefore, change a customer’s mind is extremely difficult when you have experienced such a tragic incident, even if you are just a spectator. That’s why the company has to tend forward a new game changing, set new rules and provide another customer’s environment for them to choose.
Following these thoughts, this is the proposal in order to find a solution for such a corporate crisis within United Airlines:
● Culturally, politically and strategically speaking, United Airlines has to redesign their policies and focus more on customer relationship experience by proposing some rules within the company like:
1. United Airlines cannot remove any passenger when this one is already seated in the aircraft unless his safety is at risk.
2. Increase the customer compensation up to $10,000 for the ones who volunteer to give up their seats.
3. Reduce the amount of overbooking.
4. United Airlines will not use the police force to solve these type of difficult situations unless safety is at risk.
5. United Airlines will provide a solutions team just to pivot on these kind of situations where safety is not involved in.
● They will have to make more efforts in matters of organization + logistics = planning, to avoid last minute crew flight bookings and if it’s ineludible, the solution has to favour the money factor rather than customer experience (it’s more expensive to acquire a new customer than to maintain an existing one).
● Related to strategic design United Airlines for the future occasions cannot break their own statements by any circumstance unless safety is at risk.
● An automated system that could directly speak to customers through the app or messages about the updates of seats availability and compensations.
● Develop creative campaigns aiming to customer’s experience, like for example: “ United Airlines accept that sometimes in relationships things could be difficult but the most important fact is that they recognize their failure and UA is willing to get the customer’s heart back no matter what it takes”, do something like this using humour and reality situations that affect people on a daily basis.
Possible actions to the root causes
Culture defect
As we mentioned above, this accident also reveal the culture defect behind the giant company has huge deficit perception of customers value so that it influenced terrible decision by the rough contingent team structure, wrong move toward contingency policy, non-customized staff training courses, wrong decision-making process of urgent plan. Here we also provide the solution to its root causes for further offering how company cultural value can transform the organization.
Policy defect
Based on what we surveyed in other international airlines, overbooking is common for all over the world in aviation industry. Other international airlines never happened this huge PR crisis because they have well-planning multiple choices for convincing customers to adjust their schedule, such as promoting customers to other airline in the business class at similar time schedule or create non monetary different package for customers. UA should benchmark what other international airline policy do while overbooking to be more customer-oriented into execution plan. Innovative contingency plans sometimes are extra value to secure customers loyalty. For Turkish airline, if clients’ got canceled, clients can get package travel ticket in other time for whole family in Turkey.
Organization fatal defect
The schedule of the crew is internal arrangement within the company so the schedule of the crew should be well planned ahead of customers’ schedule, which fits customer oriented policy. All internal plans should be have its contingency plan B, which it could avoid internal factors intertwined external issues, especially overbooking is very common phenomenon. For most moral business standard in service industry, it would show unprofessional for the whole company when internal issues influence customers’ value. There is always a balancing solution between crew and customers. It is all determined by whether this leader in this company is interested in innovation growth or not.
Normal feedback workflow v.s urgent feedback workflow
Based on different analysis in the news, there is hidden message behind this. It shows the possible 4 situations- the decision maker are too low to concern the customer value so that they call the police. The second is the process of decision making is ineffective enough to catch up the flight schedule which is important for customers so that the crew make this decision on get customers away. The third is the instant response from the crew are not trained for convincing customers. The fourth is that UA doesn't provide multiple choices for customers to choose from, which other international airlines already have done this.
For those possible scenarios, we would suggest them to develop a clear scope of urgent and not urgent workflow to define between common customer issues and life in danger issues. Each workflow are designed to differentiate level of the decision maker, which Emirates airlines also have done this.
Participation and constantly searching for International aviation conference
For all defects we have indicated above, it would be better for UA to network more association airlines to learn from other airlines policy and successful customers orientation handbook and implement them within the company. Another crucial importance is the mindset of the top management team, which is capable of pivoting the company culture for more than 5 years plan. Currently, UA rely on American politics support to sustain its market position and profit. For long term scope, when there is also American-built airlines who can provide customers more choices. UA will fall down sooner than any other party if they reject to innovation.