Archive for the 'airlines' Category

How many of us now rely on being able to use the Internet to pay bills, book holidays or raise questions to a whole range of different service providers, from the gas company to travel services. I do most of my payments and booking fairly late at night, normally around 10 pm as this is for me, like many of us, the only time when I have time during the week from the routine of working  / travelling / feeding / sleeping. It’s been a very pleasant surprise for me to experience over the last few years how easy and customer focused so many of these sites have become, but there are always exceptions. I tried to book a flight for four adults to the South of France in mid November. After a bit of research I found the best flight was Easy Jet out of Gatwick to Nice.

Booking was simple, apart from the fact that you had to say ‘no’ rather than ‘yes’ to additional services and if you were not careful they were automatically added on to the final cost. The web design leads you to sign up for services you probably don’t require unless you book really carefully. 

But that was not the main problem; it was when I came to pay. I entered all my details using my maestro card, (paying a £1.75 charge!) to be routed to a secure payment process asking me to re-enter details from my card and home postcode, which I duly did, only to be rejected.

Tried again, waited, rejected. Went back to beginning of whole booking process, entered everything again, rejected. Telephone number given in case of difficulties, tried to call, message tells me office hours are 8 am to 9 pm – what use is that to me at, by now, 11.30 at night! Overall an extremely frustrating experience but from which some simple messages are clear for Easy Jet to take on board (no pun intended) 

• Web sites should show charges for services clearly and simply. Design that can confuse gives a low value experience and create cynical customers with low loyalty
• Present the true cost of booking. Show charges simply and clearly. Being told that by paying in a certain method it’s going to cost more is annoying. From my perspective if the cost had been bundled into the overall flight charge I would not have noticed        
• Think of your customer experience when using your site. Offering help, then not being able to get it, e.g. no 24 hour cover, is extremely frustrating. It’s great having total security but not when it drives customers away to an easier to access competitor

I finally managed to sort the payment out the following day, but not without a lot of hassle.  Is it me? or have others experienced the same problems?  I’d be interested in anyone who has experienced similar frustrations on airline web sites, not just Easy Jet. As the travel market gets tougher what makes you, as a customer, really frustrated about how the service providers are reacting? What do you think as customers should be happening? If you have the time, please blog our web site with details of your experiences and I’ll collate these for publication.  You never know it just might make the airlines interested enough to listen.

airlines, customer experience | No Comments

Having a great time in Tulsa. Tornado warnings apart. Apparently they can suck you out of your cellar if the doors aren’t strong enough. The locals take them seriously!

As they do their guns - a lovely sign on the main entrance to Avis’ call centre asks you politely not to bring guns in. We had a little joke about it, but our host said with a straight face “we’re hunting people and sometimes we forget…”. Maybe she said “hunting-people” but who knows.

Service is of course prompt, peremptory and American. We’ve had t-shirts made up saying “yes we are ok, and no we dont need anything since you last asked 63 seconds ago”. And sweatshirts saying “please turn the aircon off”.

On the upside, Delta Airlines now has service before and on its flights. New planes but no seat back TVs or headrests that keep your head up yet, but heh it was cheap. Hotels, shops and restaurants all have assistants who try to help and heh it’s really cheap. And the TV is plastered with democratic primaries and heh they’re really not cheap.

LimeBridge colleagues are all in great form at our 12th global gathering. Integrated voice of customer is the next big thing (ask me peter.massey@budd.uk.com ) and it’s great to see just how far the book has come - Amazon stock being sold out if a hot topic.

Tomorrow is our US Forum with 25 major companies - can’t wait. What a way to spend St George’s Day. Must fish out that Henry V quote - it’s also Shakespeare’s 444th birthday.

Not many people in Tulsa know that. Still, only 24 hours til…..it’s over (A small joke for music fiends!)

airlines, the best service is no service | No Comments

Gareth Kirkwood and David Noyes at BA made the papers in a way that any operations or customer services director would prefer not to. Terminal 5’s launch may have been a disaster, but could it have been avoided? What could they have done differently?

Yes, listen to what your staff are saying – according to the papers.

It appears that many staff were saying they weren’t trained, rehearsed or just plain didn’t know their way round. And they had told management so. Then with a feeling of lack of transparency growing, customers and the newspapers went to town on the issues.

Backed up by word of mouth, a whirlwind developed. I only know 2 people who got held up or lost bags or both. But interestingly my daughter said there was nowhere to sit, too many shops (and that’s a first for her…) and many shops didn’t have stock – that being 2 weeks after launch.

As a customer, evidently it isn’t part of BA’s culture to listen. I’ve tried giving feedback a couple of times at the airport. The staff direct you to the website. When I say I don’t get a response that way, they have no options or alternatives.

And if you’re from Virgin, don’t feel smug. They’ll take the feedback but it doesn’t change anything e.g. the staffing of desks for self service check in or premium economy haven’t changed over time.

So the incoming replacements may want to consider how they can implement systematic listening as a process…..cue what our customers are saying

BA, Virgin, WOCAS, airlines | No Comments

If only I could. Do British Airways really not mind losing business or are they so focused on other things that ensuring customer satisfaction is low on their agenda? Before Christmas we booked a long weekend trip to the South of France for ourselves and a group of friends. Due to work commitments time was short and we wanted to maximise our stay by travelling out on an early flight and returning on a late one. Objective being to get nearly two extra days in the South without the rain and cold of a British winter After searching on the web we came up with the best flight times and cost. Using BA we could fly into Marseille early, pick up a car and be at our destination by late morning. The return was late evening, allowing us a leisurely day. Great! So tickets booked and car hire arranged to pick up from the airport. All sorted, or so we thought. Weeks went by thinking this was all planned and paid for only to receive an email a couple of weeks before departure stating that the return flight was now cancelled – the only alternative offered was an morning flight that lost us a precious day away. Departure from other airports would cost us more than the original flight (and I am sure that BA would not pick up the extra for returning the hire car to a different location even though this was booked through their ‘partner’)  So, we say, lets cancel these and get other flights – we will just take our business elsewhere. Easier said than done. Has anyone else out there tried to cancel a BA flight recently? After repeated attempts to get through and being advised of the fact that “we are experiencing a lot of calls at present” so expect ½ hour waiting in a call queue, we went to the web site – should have done that first you might say, always quicker – only to find that the superbly names ‘manage my booking’ section was not working properly  So BA, do you operate a black hole policy that once you have the money you don’t care about managing any fall out? Or is it that you have fine tuned your organisation to such an extent that anything out of the norm cannot be handled efficiently? I realise flights get cancelled due to a whole raft of reasons, but surely handling the knock on effects well is critical to maintaining customer satisfaction and long term relationships, especially in such a competitive market! I want to support BA, but if this level of service continues it will be Ryan Air all the way!

airlines | No Comments

Here’s a link sent from our LimeBridge US colleagues showing one of hundreds of slams against former airline star JetBlue which stranded customers on the tarmac during fierce snow and ice storms in the US on Valetines night.

http://www.channelinsider.com/article/JetBlue+the+Channel+and+Me/201587_1.aspx?kc=CICNWEMNL022307EOAD

This is already turning into “lessons learned” for handling bad PR, IT fixes needed, reservations centre capacity during bad weather, and a lot more. JetBlue’s blue-in-face CEO/Founder has said that he will double res agents, all at home, a daunting task among many other changes they need to make. But as the article says, at least he’s been honest about the cock ups.

One of his gaffes, our LimeBridge colleagues thought, was stating that “only 10,000 customers” were affected out of a much larger number who’ve been using JetBlue – “only”!!

It will be fascinating to see if they survive the talk show jokes (such as “the free ticket that JetBlue will give the folks who spent 10 hours on the runway in New York will let them spend 10 hours on the runway in Miami”, stuff like that)

airlines, honesty | No Comments

Virgin Airlines bag drop queues are a joy ! (see photo). You check in online before traveling to speed up check in, save trees, know you can sit together and leave home later. Sounds great but as the photos show, Virgin hasn’t worked out how to avoid queues to “not-check-in” in the year since I last flew with them. The bag drop queue being longer than the check in queue. 2 simple things to do – forecasting the relative number of checked in vs check in customers so the spread of desks is matched; alter the process at the desk. There’s no recognition of anything you did online. Same questions, same process as if you hadn’t checked in. To cap it they still give you an extra paper folder marked tickets to put your boarding card in. Come on Virgin you can do better than that !

airlines, self service | 1 Comment