Turning back to the group, I looked at the person nearest me and asked, “What does this say?”
Across my T-shirt were the words:
“Never judge a book by its cover!”
I asked the person who had read the words to stand up and call them out loudly to the whole room, to bring the chatter to a halt.
Their faces dropped. Many knew me already: my girlfriend was a senior purser, and I lived in the same community as around two hundred to two hundred and fifty cabin crew. When they heard my pronounced Geordie accent, those who knew me could hardly believe my performance.
The course had the impact I had hoped for. They remembered virtually everything we went on to discuss, and their desire to learn came from the heart. It mattered to them personally because they recognised how their own attitudes could affect the people they served.
By the end of the afternoon, they had adopted a new mindset, aligned with the standards of customer service the airline wanted to deliver. They left happy. Over the next three months, I trained around seventy to eighty per cent of the airline’s staff.
Two years later, the airline was voted Airline of the Year for customer service for the first time, and continues to win awards to this day.