In February when a major ice storm hit the East Coast; JetBlue left hundreds of passengers trapped on planes for several hours on the tarmac at JFK International Airport in New York.

It also stranded thousands of other passengers when it canceled more than 1,000 flights. Once the customer-service darling of the U.S. airline industry, JetBlue lost millions of dollars following the February fiasco.

JetBlue's Chief Executive Officer David Neeleman has apologized profusely, acknowledging that the airline should have responded more quickly and should have had a better plan to get passengers off those planes.

It has offered refunds and travel vouchers to passengers who were stuck on those planes some for as long as 11 hours, and has developed a new Customer Bill of Rights. "It's too little too late," says John Tschohl, a Minneapolis-based international service strategist and speaker and author of several books including Loyal For Life: How to Take a Customer From Hell to Heaven in 60 Seconds. "JetBlue had one of the strongest customer-service brands in the country—and it blew it in one day.

Because it had no service recovery plan, JetBlue has destroyed its brand and, with this one fiasco, negated all the positive publicity it has garnered over the years. This was a devastating example of lack of service recovery and employee empowerment. Someone—the pilots, the flight attendants, or the station manager—should have had the authority to make a decision to get passengers off those planes.

But JetBlue had no service recovery plan." JetBlue isn't the only airline—or company—without a service recovery plan and employees empowered to put it into practice, however. It took United Airlines almost four months to offer to reimburse meal, hotel, car rental, and airline tickets for passengers who were stranded on two flights in late December, when a blizzard in Denver, Colorado, resulted in the planes being diverted to in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Although JetBlue acted more quickly, neither airline acted quickly enough. "The magic with service recovery is that it has to happen on the frontline, immediately, not by a senior executive the next day or the next week," says Tschohl, who has developed and delivered more than 26 customer service training programs throughout the world. "Service recovery simply does not exist in most companies in the United States or in the world." The service recovery objective, Tschohl says, is to create a "wow" experience, one that is so exceptional the customer feels compelled to sing the company's praises to anyone and everyone who will listen. "For service recovery to work, you have to bend and break the rules to take care of the customer—to the customer's satisfaction, not to the company's satisfaction," he says. "No one at JetBlue made an empowered decision to get those passengers off those planes. And, when the airline offered passengers a free ticket, at an average price I would put at about $200, it was too cheap in its compensation, particularly for passengers who had endured 11 hours on its planes."

If you want to institute a service recovery plan—and ensure that your customers remain loyal—Tschohl recommends taking the following four steps:

1. Act Quickly..

"For service recovery to work," Tschohl says, "the customer's problem must be dealt with—and resolved—within 60 seconds. Don't say you'll get back to the customer tomorrow. Do whatever needs to be done—and do it immediately. The longer it takes for a complaint to be resolved, the angrier the customer gets." .

2. Take Responsibility.

"Too many employees want to blame someone else for a customer's problem," Tschohl says. "The customer doesn't care who made the mistake; he wants the employee standing in front of him to take care of it. You must own the problem. Apologize on behalf of your organization and then do whatever is necessary to resolve the problem."

3. Practice Empowerment.

"Empowerment is the backbone of service recovery," Tschohl says. "The employee dealing with the customer must be empowered to make an immediate decision to deal with, and resolve, a customer's complaint. It should never be bumped up the ladder where it will take much more time—and cost much more—to resolve.

Unfortunately, many employees are afraid to make empowered decisions, fearing they'll be reprimanded, have to pay for what they gave to the customer, or be fired for making a mistake in serving that customer. Service recovery requires empowerment at all levels of the organization."

4. Compensate the Customer.

"Service recovery doesn't end when you solve a customer's problem," Tschohl says. "You must give the customer something of value. Every organization has something it can give a customer that won't cost the company a lot of money but that has value in the eyes of that customer.

Identify products or services your organization has that you can give away when your organization makes a mistake. A restaurant can offer a free dessert at a real cost of about $1 but that has a perceived value of $5 in the customer's eyes. A computer company can offer an extended warrantee; an airline can offer a free ticket or a free first-class upgrade. The compensation, Tschohl says, must escalate with the inconvenience or pain the customer experiences. "If I had been stranded on one of those JetBlue planes and missed a cruise I had booked for $1,000, for example, a roundtrip ticket would be an insult," he says. "The airline should have offered each passenger a roundtrip ticket for every hour they were stranded on those planes. And the only reason United offered any compensation at all was because of the bad publicity it received in the media, particularly in USA Today." If JetBlue and United Airlines had had a service recovery plan in place and put that plan into practice, both would have averted the anger—and all the negative publicity—that resulted from those passengers they left stranded. "When a customer approaches you with a problem, you must act quickly, take responsibility, make an empowered decision, and offer some form of compensation," Tschohl says. "When you do that, you will have a customer who will be loyal for life."

John Tschohl is an international service strategist and speaker. Described by Time and Entrepreneur magazines as a customer service guru, he has written several books on customer service, including Loyal For Life, e-Service, The Customer is Boss; Achieving Excellence Through Customer Service, and Ca$hing In: Make More Money, Get a Promotion, Love Your Job.

You can contact John at 952-884-3311 or e-mail him at quality@servicequality.com