COC Group Assignment

Crisis
Air India had an incident wherein flight was rescheduled and few of the passenger
had received wrong flight timing information in the message delivered to them
by airline as a result they couldn’t reach as per the standard reporting time and
were late by five minutes, even though they arrived much ahead of the scheduled
departure time. Still Airline staff were not ready to extend any support to these
passengers. There was no empathy shown by airline staff when the panic in
passengers was clearly visible. Also, no efforts were given to bolster customers
who were in stress, even one among them was crying badly as she won’t be able
to attend an exam, if she misses flight. Instead of showing empathy and giving
support to panicked customers, airline staff kept on behaving rude as if they were
person without emotions.
The video was uploaded on by one of the passenger and it went viral after couple
of days when shared on social media and also picked by online portals.
Crisis Communication Strategy and its Effectiveness
Crisis communication should be strategic and effort should be made to improve
the situation for stakeholders and the organisation. Since Air India is govt.
controlled organisation so they don’t have to bother/worry much about investors’
sentiments and their reactions while responding to the situation. Same was
reflected in their communications.
When video went viral and negative conversations for the carrier flooded media
and market then Air India spokesperson responded to situation and his statement
was “It’s clearly seen in the video that our staff has told the girl that we would
try to accommodate on the next flight but we cannot allow her on this flight.” It
was unapologetic and simply defending the stand that Air India staff took while
dealing with customers who were in stress of missing the flight.
While communicating on such a crisis scenario tone should be humble, language
should be simple and communication should be to give information, rather than
communicating with attitude and having an unapologetic tone. Effective
communication is the foundation for establishing a relationship with
audiences/customers and it’s essential to create an emotional connect. By
establishing the right emotional connection, brands/organisations can expect
specific emotional and behavioural responses. This is how the customer
relationship is build and strengthens the right relationship.
Company’s tone/style of communication following a crisis should be such that it
avoids chaos or disconnect with customers. But the statement given by Air India
spokesperson reflects that airline neither empathized nor sympathised with its
stressed customers in this situation. Also if we look at the first statement of
Airline’s tweet, it says “Air India is distressed at the video on the social media
COC Group Assignment

showing its airport staff in poor light. The matter is being examined”. Its
customers were already irritated because of airline staff’s behaviour seen in the
video and spokesperson’s statement and airline’s tweet was like adding fuel to
the fire. There was no step taken by Air India to regain the confidence of
customers. Airlines might lose a big chunk on social capital by not responding
sensibly and responsibly during the time of crisis.
The way Air India did responded on Twitter was a truly pathetic response worthy
of Air India — incomplete, unapologetic. Air India must learn the rules of
engagement with people – their customers. People are willing to forgive if you
try to genuinely reach out to them. In this case, Air India isn’t even trying to reach
to the suffered passengers, while apology was never seemed to be an option for
Air India.
In this situation Air India was once again caught napping under a poor
communication strategy. In this age of instant communications this kind of
incidences are blunders and subsequent ill-mannered crisis communications are
disasters. These sets the narrative for public perception of a
company/service/person and Air India should have foreseen the outcome and
planned a better communications strategy to counter this. The services industry
is always challenged by customer expectations. But ignoring effective
communications and doing a lip service by posting a tweet won’t stop negative
sentiments circulating on the Internet.
Even post so much hue-and-cry in media there had been no update from Air India
on the issue for long. The first PR response to incident came on 4th day of the
incident when the video became viral in social media and was shared more than
50k times on social media. Enough damage was already done by this time. The
response on twitter by Air India read “The matter is being examined” was in no
way repairing the damage, instead it created a further deep hole in the wound.
The communication made by Air India in after-math of this incident didn’t show
any effort to mitigate the effect that incident has caused in general public and
prospective customers. Quick reaction, assurance, and clear message are
attributes every brand should develop during crisis. This case tells about Air
India’s negligent approach to a crisis communications. Considering there had
been many past examples of customer dissatisfaction and anger which dented
brand image on social media, one would have expected Air India to be prepared
for such an eventuality.
Air India is far behind the competition when it comes to real-time customer
service and social media engagement — they need to be where their customers
are, if they want to improve their business.