A week later, more than 1,000 flights have been canceled, turning an egregious mishandling of a weather situation into a cascading flight scheduling nightmare. CEO David Neeleman told the New York Times today:

"We had so many people in the company who wanted to help who weren't trained to help," he said. "We had an emergency control center full of people who didn't know what to do. I had flight attendants sitting in hotel rooms for three days who couldn't get a hold of us. I had pilots e-mailing me saying, 'I'm available, what do I do?'"

JetBlue's problem, if we believe its CEO, wasn't bad or indifferent employees. Apparently there were plenty of workers who had the willingness to do something; what they lacked was the ability. There were communications gaps. Two thousand Salt Lake City-area call center agents, some home-based, were overwhelmed and under-scheduled. Lean airport staffing saved the airline money, but left it paralyzed last week.

You can always apologize for a simple mistake or a problem that was caused by a single employee's error in judgment. But what if it's systemic? Your customers will lose confidence, and it will only be hastened and intensified by super-empowered angry customers like Genevieve.

So what can you do? In December, our Joe Fleischer spoke to Schwab Institutional Trading and Operations' (SITO) about how they and their clients weathered Hurricane Katrina. Read about it -- there are some good ideas there.

Last August we ran an article by Tim Montgomery, principal of the Service Level Group, called "Help Your Front Line Provide New Returns," which discusses ways a call center can make sure its agents have the power and freedom to suggest innovation and take appropriate action when the need arises.

To go back to the airline example, imagine if an empowered JetBlue employee found a way to get some buses out to the runways to get passengers back to the terminal. Rumor has it the Port Authority was willing to help, and had buses available, but was never asked.

It applies to the call center, too. Montgomery writes:

Unfortunately, in many cases, the contact center isn't given the ability to invest the necessary people time it takes to realize a measurable return. Yes, to get the full impact of a focused front-line solution initiative, agents will not only have to be given time off the phone, it must be done in a way that shows the company values their input in the same manner as their handling of a customer.