VANCOUVER — When Don Bell and his partners set-out to form the airline that would become known as WestJet, known of them had any experience running an airline, although they’d flown on plenty of them. They knew they had to be different, though, and they knew that started with customer service.
And when it came to customer service, Bell just looked back to his experience in the IT channel community, having spend 18 years as owner and president of a Calgary-based computer company.
“I learned everything I knew about customer service from that computer business,” Bell told attendees in a keynote address last week at Simply Partnership, Sage Software’s annual user conference.
In his address, Bell shared some of those customer service and business best practices that helped make WestJet the success it is today, and helped the airline survive in a business littered with the corpses of failed airlines.
In fact, IT was critical to the WestJet story from day one, when the company decided to bypass the legacy booking and reservation systems and hire some developers to build its own system from the ground-up that would work quickly and empower front-line agents to accommodate customer requests easily.
“We called it Open Skies,” said Bell. “We wrote it on a Hewlett-Packard Mini, called an HP 3000. It ran the TurboStore non-relational database and it was written in, get this, COBOL.”
The first thing WestJet wrote in its business plan was that it had to be visibly unique at every touchpoint, said Bell, and key to that was going against the traditional business mantra that the customer or the shareholder is number one.
”It was very clear to us at that if you put your people first, they’ll take care of the business and the customer and the shareholder,” said Bell.
Learn more about Bell’s business success lessons from WestJet in this CDN video:
Follow Jeff Jedras on Twitter: @JeffJedrasCDN.
