Tag: southwest

  • Book Cover: How to Share Your Faith on a Plane

    [download id=”15″]

    I have a knack for getting an empty seat next to me when I fly Southwest.

    On more than 60% of my 2010 flights I sat in the window seat and had an empty middle seat. In January 2011, I flew with Southwest 11 times and had an empty middle seat 7 times. (The other 4 were completely full flights with no empty seats.)

    As I bragged about this to my friends, they began to wonder: How in the world is Adam doing that?

    I’m not going to share all of my tricks. (Here’s a blog with some decent tips) But one thing that definitely helps looks like this:

    • Make sure you are in the A boarding group
    • Sit in a window seat, then place a book or your iPod/headphones in the middle seat.

    It’s the book detail that my friends bring up and eventually resulted in the graphic you see above. More often than not I am reading a non-fiction Christian book like Kenda-Creasy Deans Almost Christian or John Ortberg’s Faith and Doubt. For some reason those types of titles tend to cause on-coming passengers to continue moving towards the back of the plane more than the latest issue of Sports Illustrated or Wired.

    That’s the genesis of this fake book cover. My friends and I hypothesized, “If people won’t sit next to me because I’m reading a book with a Christian title, what would happen if I made a fake book cover with an overtly Christian title AND made the book about evangelism?”

    That’s how this was born.

    How to Share Your Faith on a Plane: 25 Scenarios for Converting This Flight from Transportation to Transformation

    Instructions:

    • Download the pdf.
    • Print/cut it to the size you need. (The original size is the size of a standard hard cover book with a jacket)
    • Replace the jacket your book came with and follow the tips on the back cover.

  • Customer Service Matters

    When it comes to customer service, it matters. It is one of those things that I have always been quick to notice… and lately I’ve come across some amazing examples of it.

    In the past 30 days I’ve received remarkable, incredible, stellar…. unbelievable service from several companies I have new relationships with. Stunning!

    Observation: Start-ups have better customer service because they have to. They see the connection between a happy customer and their bottom line. They know that a happy customer will tell their friends about a fantastic experience. Conversely, they know that a bad customer experience will spread like wildfire. Incredible customer service is a cheap marketing strategy!

    But start-ups aren’t the only ones with great customer service. That’s what makes AT&T and Apple such a crazy combination for the iPhone! AT&T has has had horrible customer service for decades and they are so big they don’t care one ounce. They know for every 10 customers they lose to bad customer service there are 10 more who will create a new account. And Apple has created a culture of stellar customer service to the point where people will spend an extra 1000 for a laptop just because they know if they ever have a problem they can take it back to the store.

    Southwest Airlines is another long-standing company with stellar customer service. I’ve purchased tickets with them before, not read the rules, and had to call to ask a refund… even though I didn’t deserve one. Not only have they given it to me, they’ve always done it happily even though it was my mistake!

    Why does stellar customer service matter? In today’s marketplace a purchase is all about the experience. If you go the extra mile your customers will love you forever. They will wear your t-shirts and brag to their friends that they are your client.

    Customer experience is the next great wave of marketing.