I didn’t expect that our family trip to Florida would end with me driving a plane load of passengers nearly 200 miles to their homes, but it did.

Yes, it was a long and strange journey home. A journey that started in the tropical warmth of southern Florida and ended the next morning in central Pennsylvania, which felt like the arctic wastelands, thanks to the dreaded polar vortex.

During this journey, I didn’t just experience temperature extremes, but also extremely different levels in the quality of customer care. Working at Minitab, I'm very aware of the quality of service because quality improvement is our key mission.

Setting the stage

In this story, there are some factors that the airline understandably can’t control, like the odd mechanical problem and the fact that the nation’s air traffic system was backed up due to the polar vortex gripping the region in arctic conditions. However, there are other factors that the airline can control, such as its policies, training, and the flow of information through the organization.

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