PIERCE: Southwest doesn’t accept customer complaints via e-mail, only snail-mail letters and phone calls. Why?
BARRETT: I think it is a horrible way to communicate. It’s hard enough sometimes to decipher what a person means in a written communication that they might have really spent some time on. For some reason, people seem to think that everything they learned about English grammar, spelling or whatever has to go away, and you don’t have to worry about it if you do e-mail. So if we allowed e-mails, instead of contacting the customer once, we would end up contacting the customer at least twice, because the first contact would be to get clarification, and you know what? That’s not productive as far as I’m concerned. And everything that we do is about productivity. Everything. I don’t want to handle one file three times. I want to handle it once, and I want to handle it right.
What about internal correspondence with Southwest’s 35,000 employees?
I don’t encourage it. And when employees call or try to send me an e-mail address, they find that I don’t have one. But I probably get 200 e-mails a day, because people send them to other people here and say, “Print out for Colleen.” I think e-mail is very impersonal. One of the first messages that I delivered when e-mail first became the rage was “I don’t ever want to hear that you ever used an e-mail for what should have been a personal, one-on-one, eye-to-eye conversation.”
So what do you receive instead of e-mail?
I get handwritten notes, I get telephone calls with messages that are transcribed or given to me, we get notes on napkins, we get notes on barf bags. People know that I am a communication freak. They know if they get in touch with me, they’re gonna hear from me.
Do other people at Southwest use e-mail?
Oh, yeah. I may be the only one that doesn’t.
Do you use e-mail at home?
No, much to my son, my grandson and my brother’s regret. They just hate it.
You’ve got a 1991 computer–a dinosaur by today’s standards–and the screen is completely black, with a single blinking cursor. Do you ever surf the Web?
I don’t even know how. I can basically type a memo, change it and get it out. I do nothing else with it.
Do you use a Palm PDA?
No, I’ve given them as gifts. I’m really down to No. 2 pencils.
You still write handwritten notes to employees for their birthdays, anniversaries, anniversaries of hiring and other occasions. Why?
We’ve talked at Southwest from the day we were born about wanting a family atmosphere–today everyone talks about that within companies–but that really is the way we evolved. And you can’t say “We’re a big family” and not recognize significant events in people’s lives.
Besides not using e-mail or the Web, you don’t drive, have no personal driver or Palm and only recently got a cell phone. Do you think other company presidents will laugh when they find out?
