In light of my recent posts regarding Cebu Pacific, it has become obvious that it is attempting to repair a damaged public relations image, especially in the internet where the horror stories have persisted. It has become damaging enough that Cebu Pacific had to put up a blogging contest to counter it.
I personally believe that that contest will fail, considering some of their “victims” consist of the country’s more active members of the blogosphere, all of whom subscribe to each others’ blogs and would have read about their alleged atrocities already. A blogging contest would be tantamount to hiring amateurs, when what they need is a competent PR agency in the Philippines to repair their image.
Now if they can’t (or won’t) afford a professional PR agency, I’m sure these things would help though:
- Train their people in customer relations, especially in handling irate customers. Seriously. The way some of their employees treat passengers who are already inconvenienced despite being paid customers needs really, really serious work. If their employees start treating their customers with more respect then maybe the inconvenience of having one’s flight delayed would be lessened.
- Learn to sincerely apologize to their customers when such inconveniences happen. Not only have passengers experienced being shouted at or mocked, many have had nary a sorry from employees, nor the company, when things go wrong. No wonder these people would blog bad things about them. Even a blanket apology after the fact may be able to restore whatever goodwill was lost during unfortunate situations.
- Stop trying to fight fire with fire. Arguing with irate customers makes things worse. Ignoring customers who need attention makes things worse. Putting up a blogging contest which will usually comprise of empty testimonials which were written for the sake of prizes will not effectively counter around two years worth of negative blog entries, all written with sincere disappointment. Nobody could ever trump that kind of blogging, especially if an already massive amount of entries is already on the net. There are ways to find out how to contact these bloggers: communicate with them instead — and maybe that act by itself would convince those bloggers that 5J actually cares about them, and write about that instead.
Now I do not have any experience in public relations — the only training I have ever received was a Guthrie Jensen conducted customer service seminar four years ago. But if Cebu Pacific did even just one of the points stated above, I’d be convinced that there’s hope for things to be better with them.
7 responses so far ↓
1 Abeth // Sep 16, 2008 at 5:27 pm
Hello there! I’m confused.. In your previous post, you accused the airline of putting a spin on negative press coming out about them. And on this post, you’re suggesting that they should hire a PR firm - for what, for putting a spin?
In fairness to the wordcamp organizers, who did a very good job at bringing wordcamp here, their purpose is to get more bloggers to write about mindanao & other phil. cities.
Lemme ask you: would you have complained if the contest was called Philippine Airlines Blogging Contest?
2 Jon Limjap // Sep 16, 2008 at 7:02 pm
Abeth,
I simply think that the “should not put Cebu Pacific in a negative light” clause simply sounds cheap, and should have merely been implied.
Blog entries which violated that could’ve been scored low on points — plain and simple. Cebu Pacific is part of the panel of judges for the contest anyway, right?
I understand that the main point of the blogging contest is to promote Philippine cities. That’s well and good. But I sincerely hope Cebu Pacific does not expect this contest to drown out the plethora of blog posts regarding negative experiences from their airline and personnel.
As for the PR thing, my answer is up there. Right before the bullet points. Read again
Would I have complained if it were PAL? If PAL gave shoddy service, yes. But I don’t have sufficient experiences of shoddy service from PAL so far.
3 Mrs. G // Sep 28, 2008 at 11:13 am
Spin or no spin, I’m never going to fly Cebu Pacific again!!!
4 Sidney // Oct 13, 2008 at 1:33 pm
There is a nice article about avoiding PR Disaster from the Harvard Business School.
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/2402.html
Lance Gokongwei as a alumnae of The Wharton School knows that… but he might not be aware of the problems in his company.
5 Jon Limjap // Oct 13, 2008 at 5:21 pm
Sidney,
It would be really, really bad if Lance doesn’t have an idea of what has happened to the reputation of his company. It becomes a case of being too hands-off with your own venture.
6 Joey SLF // Oct 14, 2008 at 7:15 pm
There are three siopao stores, A, B and C. Ingredients vary, tastes vary, service varies but they all satisfy hungry customers. However, store C sells the cheapest siopao. Every once in a while, glitches happen - no stock, cancelled orders, late delivery, etc. Customers curse the employees, vow never to buy from store C again, and blog on the internet. The owner and employees discuss damage control in their Mancom meetings and come up with all sorts of ideas but the bottom line is just keep on improving service. Things happen. Such is life, minsan malas, but you have to grin and bear it.
And in spite of all the negative press, kahit na pinaka masama na ang reputation niya, people still buy siopao from store C because mura e!
Eat your heart out!
7 Jon Limjap // Oct 15, 2008 at 7:33 am
Joey,
Unfortunately, that works too. Cheapskates ruin everything.
But does that mean that we should just shut up an d not talk about it? Does that mean we don’t have the right to bitch?
Now, you have PAL who is uber-expensive and you have Cebu Pac who is uber-cheap. I wonder if there is a mid-tier market.
Leave a Comment