No Extra Fee for Emotional Baggage: Could Scoot Be More Empathetic?

Lars Voedisch's Views on "how do you, as a business leader, cope with or, better yet, prevent burn-out at work."

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Lars Voedisch highlights how Scoot should go beyond emphasizing technical terms like “net promoter score” and focus on being emphatic towards its customers.

Lars Voedisch, Founder and Managing Director of PRecious Communications was featured in Marketing Interactive’s ‘Branding News’ section on June 19, 2019, in an article titled ‘Scoot CEO acknowledges service lapses: Will his words help in the route to recovery?’. Recently, the airline made an emergency landing in Chennai, due to a smoke alert and was also involved in a false bomb threat situation. Although no casualties were reported by the airline, it affected the image of the brand. Last December, the airline was also called out by passengers over lack of communication from the airline when one of Scoot’s flights that was to depart from Taipei was delayed for over two days that lead to cancellation of 356 passengers’ New Year plans.

In November 2018, Scoot’s CEO Lee Lik Hsin said the airline is “not perfect”, and there is “always work to be done”. He went on to explain certain technicalities around the airline’s on-time performance (OTP) metric. In an attempt to ensure communication with customers, he added that he would be turning towards social media platforms to get feedback.

Here is Lars’ comment as featured in Marketing Magazine’s article ‘Scoot CEO acknowledges service lapses: Will his words help in the route to recovery?’

“Using technical terms such as on-time-performance or net promoter score, and also laying out the strategies Scoot is deploying in the interview, shows a lack of empathy.”

“The CEO could have talked about the people in general, instead of processes and measures. What’s lacking from the interview is a feeling of empathy. There’s a saying that goes ‘nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care, and that part isn’t sufficiently addressed.”

“But all those strategies will just be lip service until the next flight disruption shows how Scoot will handle it hopefully better than in the past.”

Lars Voedisch highlights how Scoot should go beyond emphasizing technical terms like “net promoter score” and focus on being emphatic towards its customers.

Why Are We Talking About This?

While there are all kinds of PR strategies that brands employ, it is empathy that separates the ordinary and the extraordinary. To truly reach out to your audience, it is essential to communicate empathetically. While there are abundant statistics and information available, empathy is rare.

It is a known fact that consumers prefer brands that care about their viewpoints and frequently take their feedback into account. Many modern CEOs see corporate empathy essential to efficiently running a business.

New research from customer engagement platform Braze identifies the top emotional and functional attributes that make a brand “more attractive and human” to an audience. The Braze Brand Humanity Index, based on a commissioned study done by Forrester Consulting, is accompanied by the firm’s Brand Humanity Assessment tool that offers ways to measure their brand humanity and their impact on the business.

According to the study, 60 percent of brand experiences lead to human-like connections, while the remaining are not fulfilling these attributes. Further, 57 percent of consumers say that human communication helps to build brand loyalty, and 58 percent say that empathetic communication is more likely to get them to purchase a brand or use their service.

In the current scenario, consumers are looking for empathetic, helpful and thoughtful communication from brands. If you fulfil these attributes, nothing can stop you from building a pool of loyal customers!