First, the story in short: Harry Winsor, an 8-year-old child, is an airplane lover. Out of passion, he designed his own airplanes and sent one of his drawings to Boeing with the suggestion that they manufacture his plane.
The initial reply from Boeing was in a dead corporate style:
“We do not accept unsolicited ideas. Experience showed that most ideas had already been considered by our engineers and that there can be unintended consequences to simply accepting these ideas. The time, cost and risk involved in processing them, therefore, were not justified by the benefits gained.”…
This reply obviously isn’t encouraging for an 8-year-old. Facing a dilemma over whether to inform Harry on Boeing’s reply, Harry’s father, Mr Winsor, posted the problem to his blog readers. Many comments reflected that Boeing needed to deal with customers better.
Boeing’s Respond
Boeing observed that several Harry’s supporters are tweeting about this issue. Despite just starting out on their Twitter account a couple of weeks ago, Boeing responded quick and well. It has shown both empathy and a willingness to rectifying the problem.
In response to Harry’s supporters, Boeing tweeted:
On top of using Twitter, a Boeing representative also commented on Mr Windsor’s blog post (below). Boeing even went the extra mile to share a site that was created for airplane enthusiasts like Harry himself.
The ending is sweet and everyone got something in return. Boeing learned a lesson while Harry’s design was requested to be displayed in the Museum of Flight. Most importantly, Boeing has shown other corporations that a brand, no matter how uptight it is, can be humanized through the use of social media.
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“What intrigued me,” Mr. Winsor said, was “all of a sudden there was all this positive feedback — ‘Boeing responded, this is so cool’ — and the more they got encouraged, the more they engaged in it.” The Future of Flight museum contacted Harry about a kids’ drawing contest, and the Museum of Flight called to offer a tour. Mr. Blecher (Boeing representative) ended up calling Harry and e-mailing with Mr. Winsor, and the company is working on a response to Harry’s initial letter and a better way of handling submissions from children.
“It was just so cool to see a company become kind of human,” Mr. Winsor said.
Source: The New York Times
