Archive for the 'airlines' Category

Posted by: Peter Massey | 14.10.2011

An outstanding dumb moment this morning from BMI, flight BD081

On Weds I flew out to Belfast from Heathrow in row 6. I was only allowed to check in on a middle seat even though there the plane was half empty. As it turned out the window seat next to me was empty and I moved into it once the door closed. I tweeted about why do I need to be made to feel third class, presumably for buying cheap tickets, when there are plenty of seats.

It also reminded me that I don’t like the arbitrary number of cheap seats vs full price economy they display on their website. I’m used to Easyjet and Flybe where its just once price. Yes the price moves up nearer the time, but the whole plane moves up together. The BMI booking shows you you can still book more expensive seats in economy – i.e. they just dont want to sell you the lower price. It riles. Nearly as much as how much money BA are wasting to advertise their USP – being older than anyone else… – do you get that ad? I don’t. Surely a case of an old badge on old clothes.

So now it’s v early Friday morning going back. Same thing at check in, only middle seats allowed. I get row 7. Plane still half full. There’s 3 of us in row 7, ABC and nobody in row 6.

It takes a while to board as the lady on the aisle has to get up for me and then we both have to get up for the guy in the window seat. Why have none of the traditional airlines read the paper that says boarding by letter rather than number is way faster. A & F first, B & E second, C&D last. Families can board together. No one has adopted it.

Now to the dumb stuff. There’s 3 of us stuffed in 7ABC and I need to work. After take off I move forward to an empty row 6. I am approached by the stewardess to tell me I shouldn’t have moved.

“But it’s empty and that one’s full”. Ah but I have crossed an invisible barrier into the front of the plane…..

“The seats are the same, there’s no curtain and, I sat here on the way out”.

“Yes but you’re now in premium economy”.

“Let common sense apply – surely?”

“Well I’ll have to check” …as the steward comes forward. He doesn’t look at me or talk to me, only to his stewardess.

She relays to me that “he’s not happy” as it could be that a passenger in the back could be a premium customer and could see me go forward and could be offended. Presumably premium customers are trained to see the invisible curtain and invisible difference in the seats and know that it moves from Wednesday to Friday!!

Generously, after admonishment, I am allowed to sit and work.

No wonder the Flybe flights are full and the BMI ones half empty.

A classic dumb thing. I wonder if I’ll get told off if I ask to take their photo? OK back to work…

airlines, customer experience, dumb things | 1 Comment

Posted by: Peter Massey | 17.03.2011

Netpromoter scores abound and it’s interesting to see the US NPS benchmarks now being published in competition with the American Customer Satisfaction Index ( ACSI ) . Recently colleague Bill Price in the US was speaking at a conference on customer happiness and we all continue to push the case for removing dumb things under the banner of reducing customer effort (search categories: “customer effort”), another way of measuring customers.

So many things to measure: likelihood to recommend, satisfaction levels, happiness and effort.

I just wish people would stop putting their money and energy into measuring and use it to change things instead. The top scorers in all the these measures are the same people. The Amazons, USAAs, Southwesterns. They don’t need to be told their scores in order to change things. They live that way. They’re always listening and changing. Open to feedback, honest and transparent towards their customers and their staff.

The attention is on doing the right thing, not on measuring if we did the right thing.

Take two examples yesterday and today.

The Apple store in Covent Garden. So good it makes you purr. Sales help given, diagnostic tool for iphone and service given, additional questions answered, no time wasted. No one has tried to measure me.

Booking some Virgin Atlantic flights today. So poor I nearly gave up 3 times. 75 minutes in total. It was only the very poor chance of finding anything better ( in process terms) that stopped me. Measured in the middle of the process. And failed my feedback test: when speaking to the agent I asked what she’d do if I gave feedback and was offered the website as a place to put it.

There’s just no excuse for some of the obvious things…. the agent had to book my kids whilst I booked myself at the same time in order to get on the same flight for sure. Why? Neither she nor I can book flights on the same place out and different flights back – that’s got to be pretty common. Her price quote for me is higher than mine. The website rejected both bookings part way through booking and then changed the prices when I went back in. The webchat help can’t do anything to help as the process doesn’t allow. The credit card fees are per booking at £30+. I get pinged to give them webchat feedback scores on the agent – completely irrelevant and untimely. You can hardly hear the poor woman in the new Swansea call centre for background noise. She got off the phone pretty pronto when I started asking about sitting all 4 of us together.

And I’m writing this blog whilst I wait for my confirmation emails so I can book car hire and parking. 50 minutes and waiting. I’ll have to go back into the site and look up my arrival times.

OK so Ive booked with them but would I recommend them on any measure? Do they know these things are broken? Betcha they do.  Do they care – they got significant sum of money anyway.

I suggested the advisor bring up some benchmarks in her monthly feedback session – easyjet, the passport office, directgov. Will it change – I doubt it very much. It was like this the last time I flew with them and the time before and so on…..

So if you cant offer good service, if you aren’t already a benchmark, then don’t measure me – it makes my experience worse still. Talk to your front line staff – they know what the score is. And they know what to do about it.

Postscript: It’s now the day after. Needless to say the only pre book seats available are in 2s.

No confirmation emails came anyway, only a text for one of the bookings so I have had to ring and get the ref for the other. No answer on the customer services line so I gave up and rang using the sales option. Despite a vehement attempt to get rid of me, I hung on in and got them to give me the missing ref. Emails had been sent and failed apparently. They never send text confirmations apparently so that’s confusing.  So I called again, hung on til I got thro to customer services but couldn’t be helped. We, the agent and I, decided the only way to get 4 seats together in advance was to reach Richard Branson and get him to change the system. I really really wish I hadn’t given my money to Virgin til booking 4 people out, 2×2 back was solved. No wonder the first agent got off the phone fast yesterday when I mentioned seats.

Apple, Customer effort, Customer satisfaction, Virgin, airlines, broken websites, customer experience, feedback, netpromoter | No Comments

Posted by: Peter Massey | 22.12.2010

It seems very little judging by my experiences in the past week of moving my broadband and trying to fly out of Gatwick.

1) Both provide little to no information in advance of the journey or anything specifically useful via the website for the journey. A lack of publishing and sharing of knowledge with customers is at the root of the problem.

2) Getting to someone who can help you is then very hard and isn’t part of their process.

3) Suggesting someone else can fix it is part of their approach, so that the problem goes to someone else.

4) Having the obvious FAQs at point of need, is not something that’s available.

5) Managing the resolution easily has no structure, no triage.

6) After the problem, all appears to be very well done. Must be an expensive way to work.

If you’re interested why, then read on – its a bit boring – as detail often is.

Let’s take the airline first:

Gatwick departures board not available online all day so you can’t see the real situation and decide to stay home or not. Airline’s site shows half a dozen cancellations and a general warning. Nothing specific on my destination. Can’t get through by phone, not surprisingly. Nothing on twitter, except customers irate about the fact the website is still pushing Xmas offers and providing no data.

Departures screen shows delays back though the day. Self serve check-in is not working anymore so I must join the queue. I could see 150 people trying to get to 3 desks in a tidy crawl. Later discover this was only the part I could see and it was much longer. One lady has a clipboard and is besieged. I find out there is an intention to fly. So I join the queue and move a few metres in an hour. I give in and go home.

Appears to me that the snow isn’t the problem – ticketing passengers is broken. Obviously more desks would help, but failing that do 2 things. FAQs on white boards or flip charts – show us what you’re checking on your clipboard. Make it relevant to the outcomes. For example If you’re waiting for Belfast then a) if you are prebooked we have enough capacity once you get through the queue b) if you are not pre-booked you wont get out today so go home or get a hotel via desk xyz and c ) we are expecting all flights to go. And put this on your website – the whole queue is trying to find out anything via laptops and mobiles.

Secondly simply triage the queue by walking down it and checking for relevance and outcome – many people could have been sent home according to destination and seats/numbers. Many were probably in the wrong queue judging by the number who talked to each other and left. Many would have had certainty that it was the right thing to do.

Saying “the airport isn’t giving us slots” isn’t useful. If the airline and the airport haven’t worked out a plan, then it may be the only answer. But scenario planning should have taken place and the scenario be planned so that capacity is known and decisions, made in advance, enacted so there is clarity.

I get home and check the departures board and airline on the web – no information so I don’t know if the flight ever went. Brilliantly simple claim procedure for the ticket just using one screen and the booking reference. Let’s see if the money comes through as efficiently. Pity they cant be as efficient in the other things they do.

Customer effort? A wasted day.

What about the broadband journey then?

An order placed and MAC code provided. A  welcome call about 10 days before to take payment details and tell me what was happening – a specific date but very general about the process. On asking apparently I need do nothing. They’ll send me a router but I ask them not to as I have one – they say you might as well as its free.

The router arrives in a plain box a few days later and goes in the cellar. I dont think I had any email confirmation – at least I have no memory of one despite several references to email later . A search now, shows I don’t have one. I suspect it was sent to their new email address that they gave me and I dont want/need/use.

By the day of swap over I’m already sceptical. An absence of expectation from a lack of information.

When I come home, the phone still works. Alas the broadband doesn’t. I have an idea and look in the plain box that the router came in – there is in fact a letter. No expectations but at least the account id, password etc is there. and lots of web addresses to check things on if any problem. But no phone number in case  you don’t have broadband access to check things with.

I chill for the weekend and get by on my iphone checking all the obvious things on the website – but there’s nothing for “my service hasn’t cut over” so on Monday I phone the broadband number on the site. The IVR option 3 for faults is advertised on the site and the IVR is very simple. ( Later I get bored with it telling me I may have to wait up to 10 minutes and there’s a big queue – regardless of whether there is or there isn’t).

Eventually I get through to be told I’m through to the wrong broadband and am transferred. My phone battery dies before I get through. Later I start over and speak to someone who explains its due provisioning today – I retort that to me, it was due provisioning Friday. They don’t seem fussed. It’ll be done today.

Later I get a text to say its been done. It still doesn’t work. No response from a Twitter escalation.

It still doesn’t work Tuesday morning so I call again. Same number but I get a travel firm – redial and it goes through fine – weird. ( Later I have this again twice but to wrong routes within the company these times). This time they check and it will definitely be provisioned by noon and I’ll get a text. I get a text but no working service by noon.

In the afternoon I call again and get someone who checks and says the order hasn’t gone through but he’s getting it done whilst I’m on the phone. I ask if I’ll need to do anything else. He says no that the router is preconfigured with passwords etc. The first I know of it.  So he stays with me whilst I swap out the router and reconnect everything. Still no service but he says it will be in the next half hour.

No service a few hours later.

I call again and they say there’s a fault and it’s been reported to BT. I say there can’t be a fault because it hasn’t been provisioned yet. How can BT check something that isn’t provisioned. He says that’s tech support’s process and that’s that. I ask for escalation – he says there isn’t anyone. I cut off and immediately dial again to talk to someone else who goes through the same excuses. I ask what the SLA is with BT for faults even if there were one – you guessed, 5 working days. Escalation – there isn’t one.

I cut off and escalate with a little help from my friends.

The  chief exec’s office call within 10 minutes and an engineer 10 mins later. And the engineer’s boss ten mins later. The engineer does some triage, finding out the story so far, runs a line test and says the line is dead and there’s a BT physical problem which I challenge because nothing physical had been touched until the router was swapped. I agree to change the line filter and dismantle the wall socket and he phone’s me back. No change. I’m not willing to give in and he listens and we swap the router back to my old one and he repeats the line test – heh presto there is no BT fault. “You’ve got a faulty router, we can send you another one”. Hmmm Xmas post. We try to configure my router and whilst he’s helpful, we can’t do it. Later I manage to crack the router config using my iPhone to get a website that helps. And it works first time.

The new router is in the bin, as will the second one be if they send it by Xmas post.

Customer effort? I lost 5 days working and several hours of my time.

All avoidable by some really simple stuff around setting expectations, being transparent and sharing set up processes, providing information that’s specifically relevant to the scenarios ( eg what you will have to do, how to troubleshoot etc) and doing proper triage from the outset. Will I be surprised if I get problems with the billing? You can imagine the start date for service wont have been updated ….

And when they call for a netpromoter score I’ll refer them to this blog post.

Customer effort, airlines, contact rate, customer experience design, reduction in contacts, self service | 1 Comment

Posted by: Peter Massey | 22.04.2010

I flew to Stockholm last Thursday morning at 7.30am by British Airways from terminal 5. I’m just on the way to pick up my car, one week later.

Why did I fly? Because no one mentioned any possible disruption, despite the fact that 90% of flights were already stopped by 7am. Blissful ignorance.

Did they not have the information to give? Somehow I doubt that.

Did they think about the effort they would cause their customers downstream?  To quote Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon:

 “I think most big errors are errors of omission not commission. The times when they were in a position to notice something and act on it…and yet failed to do so”

The chain of ‘customer effort’ and frustration that BA have created for me is fascinating. And the amount ot work it caused other people and companies. All avoidable, had BA been open and honest. I’ll try and précis it.

• An afternoon of calls and web searches by me, my PA, by my concierge service, by my Swedish collague. To get information, assess options, arrange hotels, try to get a car. At least 3 calls into hotels, 6 to the office, several to local car companies, that I could see. Many calls, texts and emails to friends and contacts to try to get a car. Many calls on our behalf.
• 2 hours shopping for clothes and necessities.
• 6 texts and 2 calls to a colleague’s son whose friend had a car we could hire.
• Multiple attempts and 4 calls into 3 insurance companies to check cover for the car.
• The colleague’s son’s friend taking the morning off work to get the car test renewed before it ran out the following week.
• The son planning to fly to his sisters in London who would have to keep the car before he drove it back for his friend.
• The PA trying to get a car crossing for the channel and googling, texting  routes.
• The 26 hour journey across 7 countries by car.
• The 3 calls to HSBC for bouncing my card, presumably for being used in different countries. The very poor handling of which is resulting in them losing our business accounts. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
• The re-organising of picking up a new car back home.
• The colleague’s wife driving to Dover to pick us up.
• The re-re-organising of picking up the car ( with 2 subsequent re-visits, but that’s another story of customer effort)
• The abortive trip to Heathrow to move the car, but there were no shuttles. Big well done to BAA for waiving the car park fees!
• The actual trip now to Heathrow to pick the car up.

I could go on……. but I’m distracted by the effort in resolving how Fiat sold me a “previous model” as a new car without telling me and hoping they’d get away with it. 

One small omission by company, many large effects for customer. Huge customer effort…..

So my message is….. think about the effort you cause your customers downstream. They will. To quote Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, again: 

“I think most big errors are errors of omission not commission. The times when they were in a position to notice something and act on it…and yet failed to do so”

British Airways, Customer satisfaction, HSBC, airlines, banking, complaint, customer experience, dumb things | 1 Comment

Posted by: Ian Morton | 1.09.2008

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

Posted by: Peter Massey | 23.04.2008

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

Posted by: Peter Massey | 18.04.2008

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

Posted by: Ian Morton | 7.02.2008

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

Posted by: Peter Massey | 26.02.2007

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

Posted by: Peter Massey | 12.01.2007

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