Archive for the 'Virgin' Category

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

After a fascinating few days chairing Contact Centre Week in Dublin, one always reflects on what new insights to share with colleagues on returning to the ranch.

Yes I loved BT’s Nicola Millard’s entertaining style  - futurology and all that stuff. But I would because it’s the same stuff we already do today. It’s more today than tomorrow to be looking at new customer behaviours, blogs and wikis and new operating models for business with feedback built in.

I always love hearing more about first direct, Virgin and any company that bases its customer approach on how it treats its people, on its values. The basics of recognising people as people, and treating them accordingly, just shine through time and again.

But one thing struck a large note of curiosity and that was Virgin talking about generation Y and how they are different to work with. They had a great list of aspirations that went deeper than just what Virgin do, dressing down or dressing up.

So I did a bit of digging – take a look at some of the research into the 3 generations at work today – baby boomers, generation X and generation Y. And how it’s changing work as we know it into “Work 2.0”. Actually the trends just seem to be what we’d all want and reflect what many good businesses have done before anyway. Less patience with poor management or poor development is a good thing. Wanting more gyms and sabbaticals is hardly new.

Perhaps being prepared to stand up and take more risk to get it, this is where the difference lies with generation Y. I can’t help but admire the “balls” of gen Y to go out and get what they want. Well most of them. And not put up with something less, preferring to keep searching rather than do something less than what they want. That’s great if you got an education. And a disaster if you didn’t.

I’ll put away my UK crystal ball at this point as it’s gone a bit dark and nasty. In China and India every gen Y person and their gen X parents or baby boomer parents and grandparents want one thing – the best education you can get.

In some ways th gen Y behaviours are no surprise. I use my daughters as examples of this new generation at every opportunity when talking about customer behaviours. If you’re a student, you don’t knock next door to see who’s going for a drink, you IM them. What’s email when you can talk to several people in real time. If I can’t update my Bebo pages, how will people know that I’m alive?

Of course it left me very confused - being a perennial 18 year old, I can see all 3 sets of behaviours in what I do…..but I didn’t see how I recognise the 3 generations differently at work and manage their motivations differently. So I will look harder in future. Once I’ve understood the differences between men and women, this should be a piece of cake!

Generation Y, Virgin, future, managing | No Comments

Wow, getting my holiday blogs out of sync here…..This one’s about getting as far as New York but I forgot to publish it!

Spending my Virgin airmiles to go to New York. This is meant to be a reward for spending shed loads of money - so much going to Australia that we got enough to do New York for free.

It didn’t feel like a reward. Too many Virgin basics aren’t working. Time for some redesign of the basic experience I think. Otherwise why would Virgin think I’d spend a fortune with Virgin, next time I go business class

Here’s a few examples of how my time was wasted and their brand damaged from this one trip:
1) You cant share Virgin miles with close relatives even if you paid for the flight they earned them on

2) You can’t book airmiles and non airmiles travellers together via the website. The extras on a miles ticket is half the cost of a real ticket - hmmmm, call me sceptical

3) It took 65 minutes to book the 3 tickets manually

4) By the time they’d been booked the price on the site moved - upwards of course

5) Despite escalation during the call and after the call, no one at Virgin would talk to me about the price of the ticket that changed mid booking

6)The booking reference, cut and pasted from the reminder email, wouldn’t work so we couldn’t get access to the site to give US visa information or change seats or check in, resulting in 3 calls

7)The nice people in the Indian call centre couldn’t take a passport number of 8 digits in less than three attempts

8)At check in there are still monster queues all the time - so no one is scheduling staff to meet demand. This is highly predicatble and very frustrating

9) We got to use a member card to get us into the short queue on the premium line. It had one agent and we waited forever anyway. The lady next to us in the queue said this happens to her every time.

10)She told the supervisory types - 3 of them. Not one went and opened a desk or said they’d do something about it for next time. They just made placatory remarks, which of course wind you up up at the third time of listening to ‘there are more people coming’ - and there clearly aren’t.

11) Having a huddle of 4 supervisors talk to each other is not the same as having 4 supervisors open 4 lines to shift the problem

12) Asking to sit further forward in the plane, not an upgrade, got us moved a bit with the usual line of “the flight is full”. When we got on the plane it was a lie. The bulkhead row in front was empty. Many rows were half full or empty.

13) But apart from that its just like most airlines: indifferent

I’d love to talk to anyone at Virgin who’d like to talk about saving shed loads of money on frustrated marketing, frustrated staff and frustrated customers: peter.massey@budd.uk.com

I offered feedback to the supervisor at the airport but he was too busy dealing with the problems……obviously

Virgin, Voice of the Customer, customer experience design | No Comments

Why do so many websites not work? Eurostar’s never seems to work. You have to phone up, ask them not to charge you £5 for the privilege of buying a ticket from them because their site won’t take a booking for free.

Here’s a good one - it asks you to fill in the origin of the journey, but the box for that is missing.

The staff are obviously used to the web site not working, because they don’t ask what the problem is, or remotely suggest that they are interested in getting it fixed (that’s one for the WOCAS process www.budd.uk.com/wocas.html ). Feedback from customers and agents, so powerful but so few companies are geared up to use it - fast+systematically.

Still at least it was simple to find the Eurostar phone number under customer support.

Unlike Virgin Trains which couldn’t accept my postcode ( I assure you I do live at my home address! ) and so I couldn’t buy a ticket. No easy opt out to get help, but heh, no choice so why do they care. Unless I opted to go by air, using up all my “green” creds, I’d have to buy at the station anyway.

But it doesn’t get any better by plane. I haven’t been able to get onto the BA site to check in in the last hour. Seems like the site is down completely.

BA, Eurostar, Virgin, broken websites | 2 Comments