Companies Like United Need to Cultivate Good Judgment, and Free Their Employees to Use It

United Airlines has pledged to improve its training programs and empower its employees to put customers first in the wake of a video showing a passenger being dragged from a plane. Of all the U.S. air carriers, United should have known the power of social media and public outrage. It had learned years earlier in a prominent case about how fast viral content spreads and the ability of consumers to talk back to corporations. But the moral of this story is not how to do crisis management faster and better in a lightning-fast digital world. It’s that even the nimblest and deftest crisis management response cannot contain the damage of going straight to “call security” and crossing the last line of defense in customer service design. And an audience of customers standing by with their smartphones to record any spectacle seems to have had, until now, unfortunately, no discernible impact on corporate policy guidelines for dealing with uncooperative customers. Companies building computer-assisted rules for customer management in predictably difficult situations need to understand that human judgment is still one of the most important tools. Company leaders need to offer better employee training on all these points.