I watched the viral video of the recent scuffle between IndiGo staff and a passenger, Rajiv Katyal, several times in the last few days.
Initially, when the airline started out, I liked their smartness — in branding and in punctuality. I liked their crisp communication style — Nut Case, Hottest beverage at 33,000ft, Ramp walk for models, Sleep with your wife, among other witticisms. Their cute, innovative packaging said a thing or two about how different they were. It was a nice point of differentiation, even without tasting their food.
But now, when you experience their service — the recent one being the case in point — it leaves you with a bad taste.
Flying high on success
I would have taken over 120 flights in the last year alone, and out of those, easily about 100 would have been IndiGo. So you may grant me the ‘right by experience’ to comment on the fast-changing scenario.
The arrogance started surfacing among the check-in crew over the last few years. Curt behaviour has been steadily on the rise. It seems like the success has gone to their head. They behaved as if flyers have no other options except their airline. However, to be fair, I noticed this behaviour in a few other airlines such as GoAir, Jet Airways and Air India.
Success begets attention, and any mistake gets amplified. Brands should be extremely sensitive, because one slip is all it takes for the mighty to fall.
The growing hatred for Indigo is reflected on various social media platforms, where passengers are vowing to never fly the airline; much like customers in the US did with United Airlines for similar unacceptable customer handling incidents.
Air India, the national carrier, was the first to take a jibe at IndiGo in its ‘unbeatable’ advertisement, which has since been deleted. Another ad made by Mad Over Marketing took a dig at the airline, by pretending to be Jet Airways.
This incident comes close on the heels of PV Sindhu’s tweets about rude behaviour by an IndiGo staffer. And the animosity on social media only sums up the prevailing sentiment.
What the airline staff did to Katyal is absolutely wrong. What is even more unacceptable is the fact that IndiGo tried to hush it up. If the video hadn’t been leaked, the apology letter would not have appeared. In my view, the backlash from customers is justified.
One bad incident can take your company down. One single affected customer can cause erosion in your brand value. It takes very little to undo the image that has been painstakingly built up over many years.
Can they come out of it?
Yes, they can and they should.
Tough times call for creative solutions, and these solutions don’t come from people whose egos are bigger than the spirit and size of the organisations they serve. Creative solutions tend to place organisational interests above personal discomfiture. In this case, the negatives are big and are only getting bigger.
This matters to the entire organisation, including the stakeholders. Moreover, the airline is now a listed company. Sacking people, writing letters to the Ministry of Civil Aviation and telling the world on social media that the President of IndiGo apologised to the victim is, at best, an impersonal communication.
It is not enough.
What they can do are the following:
Get Katyal to speak for them
One suggestion is to get the aggrieved passenger to speak for them in a genuine tone of exoneration. This is possible only if a top executive (President) personally visits Katyal and engages him in a heart-warming discussion. If the head of any accused organisation comes calling, things will dramatically change on ground.
There is a possibility that the victim may go beyond neutral, beyond ‘I hold no animosity’. He may even be positive and bail IndiGo out of the current mess.
To ensure that the world knows the visit is real, video record the same. It should be shared across social media, especially the word of exoneration from Katyal. This will contribute to the ‘cooling down’ of tempers.
Appear on TV and discuss
No hiding, no silence. The airline should be visibly remorseful. The President can appear live on national TV in a pre-announced programme (say, NDTV) and admit their mistake. They should speak about the incident without defending it. Let the twitterati keep talking. The President can respond to most of the tweets on-screen. By the end of the programme, negative tweets may turn neutral and even positive.
Put Katyal on the cover of Hello 6E
Put the passenger on the cover page of their in-flight magazine. It can read something like this: ‘This is Rajiv Katyal and we ill-treated him a month back. We admit we made a mistake’. A campaign like this will cool down the tempers, as it looks genuinely apologetic and remorseful. The airline can also thank Katyal for helping IndiGo rejig its customer support system in general.
And start taking the feedback of passengers seriously. They should take visible action on lapses in service and staff behavious. Such scuffles will happen again. The staff should be trained to handle them tactfully. Call it ‘Katyal Lessons’ and institutionalise it in the training agenda.
The bigger the brand, the lower the chances of excusing its mistakes. In a make-over attempt, IndiGo should become humble, shed its ego and win customers back!
Ask for another chance. We all make mistakes. Shed the ego and save the organisation.
(The writer is Director-Branding, ICFAI Group. Views expressed are personal)