Every aircraft will have the best-quality Wi-Fi on board and every seat will have access to power. And there are many other ideas, big and small, in the pipeline that will make customer journeys smoother and more memorable.
Our people are already stepping up together to make the most of this investment and make us the airline of choice. Just imagine being part of it. Doing things the British Airways way takes a certain state of mind. Our Cabin Crew and airport colleagues were praised for their friendliness, efficiency and consistently excellent service. Praise indeed since CAPA is one of the most trusted sources of market intelligence for our industry.
Our people are proud to work for us. They give their all for our customers and each other. You can look forward to a Total Reward Package featuring an attractive pension and discounted shopping. And yes, there are some rather good travel benefits. See how you could Earn , Live and Save …. Every role at British Airways comes with the scope to learn and grow. We can guarantee you a personal development programme that offers every opportunity to gain experience and learn new skills.
The learning here is constant, because our business and industry change so fast. In many teams, there is a structured career path to follow if you demonstrate the ability and ambition. In others, there is flexibility in the way your career could progress. If you have your eye on leadership, our high-performance culture will help you fulfil your full potential. We have a team of over dedicated War on Waste Cabin Crew champions who play a key role in promoting best practice among the team.
They help us identify new initiatives that can improve recycling and waste reduction. We already pledged to remove a quarter of a billion items of single-use plastics from flights by the end of And replacing plastic wrapping with paper for blankets and headsets.
This unwavering commitment to reducing our environmental impact is something we all share. In October we committed to achieving net zero carbon emissions by You can help us achieve that aim. Pro tip: adding the widget to your Notification Centre serves up details on your flight number, departure time and flight status.
I recently took a flight from Larnaca to London Heathrow. On checking in on the BA app on my phone I wanted to add a bag as I booked my ticket without one. As soon as I entered check-in I wanted to add my bag and before I knew it it had checked me in without me being able to pay for my bag. Unfortunately BA is really lowering its standards and milking its regular customers which is a big mistake. There are so many other companies offering great services.
Wake up BA and sort your app out!!! Also people traveling with only hand luggage always get allocated the middle seat of the three seats in the middle why? I am also tired to re-authenticate even though I have a phone with FaceID that allows me to make bank transactions without having to re-type document numbers. Dear BA, as someone who lives in London, I am stuck with you.
Regarding the error messages, whatever you have going on with Expedia bookings not being able to check in on the phone, please fix it. The following data may be collected and linked to your identity:. Privacy practices may vary based on, for example, the features you use or your age. Learn More. Up to six family members will be able to use this app with Family Sharing enabled. App Store Preview. My objective from the day we launched our initial program, Putting People First, at the end of was to give all our employees the opportunity to go through a motivational program on customer service at least once every three years.
Responding to service failure was the focus of the most recent program, which was called Winning for Customers. We discourage our managers from coming down on an employee like a ton of bricks if the decision the employee made was wrong. Instead, we want managers to explain why the decision was wrong and what the right decision would have been, so that the next time the employee is confronted with a similar situation, he or she will get it right. We want our staff to know that management genuinely does care about the problems that our staff encounters.
It is not an easy thing to achieve, but we keep hammering away at it. Managers who are merely paying lip service to supporting subordinates will have nowhere to hide.
Last but certainly not least, our senior managers demonstrate their commitment to looking after the customer. We strive to practice visible management. When we put everyone through the original Putting People First program, I tried to take questions at the end of as many sessions as I could. I also should mention profit sharing. One of the first things I did when I joined the company was introduce a profit sharing program.
In the United States, such programs may be common, but they were quite alien in the United Kingdom at the time. We want our employees to understand that there is a direct connection between the service we deliver and the profits we earn. Those were the year of and the year following the Gulf War.
You have had a wide-ranging career. How did you come to hold your views on the importance of customer service? To differing degrees, all the businesses I have worked in have been service businesses—or people businesses, as I like to call them.
When I became a Norton Simon executive after it bought Avis, I still had overall responsibility for Avis as well as for Hunt-Wesson foods and a couple of other smaller subsidiaries.
And Sears also had a service business—its retail stores. All those experiences have been invaluable in helping me to develop an awareness of the importance of the interrelationship between employees, customers, and shareholders. Employees need to understand why shareholder return is important, and shareholders need to understand the necessity of investments that produce a long-term payback. Customers must understand that in order to satisfy their needs ever more effectively, we need to have an enduring relationship with them.
Some people wonder how a company can not only contemplate but actually implement and maintain extensive training, motivation, and incentive programs such as ours. My response is that for a service business, they are not decorative embroideries but essential parts of the company fabric. I suppose my evangelistic determination to strive for customer-service excellence goes back to my career beginnings as a cadet purser with the former Orient Line shipping company.
One day on a long voyage between Europe and Australia was much the same as another for passengers and crew alike. The trick, however, was to ensure that each day was like the first day at sea, with product polish and service sparkle at its brightest all the time.
That way, both customers and staff derived a sense of real value. My philosophy evolved further in the intensely competitive car-rental business, where the automobiles are very similar if not exactly the same and the initial transaction and the after-sale service are what make the difference. I have to say that working in the discerning U.
It helped bring home to me the importance of emphasizing customer-service excellence in business strategy. How do your extensive efforts to build a global network through alliances with other airlines mesh with your vision of what it takes to prevail in a service business such as yours? Clearly some markets, especially those in the Far East and Eastern Europe, will be growing much faster than the long-established markets of North America and Western Europe.
And two other likely developments should lead to lower fares, thereby fueling worldwide demand: global deregulation and the introduction of an aircraft with a much larger carrying capacity and lower operating costs than the On the contrary, we think that deregulation will lead to consolidation. It is already happening, although it remains to be seen whether the consolidation of the global industry will be as drastic as the consolidation that occurred after the U. We fully intend not just to survive but to be one of the major players, and the global network we are building is an integral part of our strategy.
We are betting that this network will enable us to lower our costs. We will be able to share resources such as airport terminals and information systems, to buy and use aircraft more efficiently, and to use employees more efficiently.
We also are betting that the network will increase our collective share of the world market, and that it will generate more business for our partners than they would be able to obtain on their own.
In addition, there are different service expectations in different marketplaces. For example, business class, which falls between first class and economy, is the preeminent service on our international routes and our short-haul routes in Europe, but it is only beginning to emerge in the U. For example, we did this with USAir when we helped it redesign its business-class service. But overall, our aim for the network at this point is twofold: to create seamless service and to create a common public identity in the market over time without adopting a single name.
We believe we can create a common identity through frequent-flier programs and by sharing frequent-flier lounges—steps we have already taken. Perhaps over time we will be able to move toward the adoption of a similar uniform and logo styles. Our marketplace performance unit now tracks how our partners perform, so we have the data we need to compare services and decide where changes are in order.
We also are working on a joint approach to information technology, which should provide the underpinning for a greater uniformity of customer service. This technology integration will allow us to share information on customers and costs, which will then allow partners in the network to take a network perspective when they make decisions about investments ranging from aircraft purchases to catering.
When you have an alliance, with whom is the employee supposed to identify? It is also important that they recognize the existence of the alliance, see it as a good thing, and talk about it in a positive way.
I hope that, over time, we shall be able to engage in a larger degree of employee exchange. In fact, we already have some. The arrangement has been very successful as far as the customer is concerned—and tremendously mind-expanding for us.
It is the development of an integrated global air-transport system in which consistency of product, service standards, and operational integrity is implicit throughout. Our multinational combine will be able to be at the forefront of technological development, whether in the introduction of new large aircraft to succeed the existing jumbo jets or in the implementation of advanced ground-handling systems that will render the check-in queue, the delays in clearing immigration and customs, and the unseemly scramble for baggage upon arrival things of the past.
There is immense scope for invention, innovation, and pushing out the competitive frontier. Not the least exciting aspect of the future will be that as staff become freed from the existing mechanical humdrum of air-travel procedures, a whole new dimension in personal customer service will open up. For me, this, more than the application of new technology, forms the great challenge of the future. The company required a radically different approach to customer relations: to champion the customer as opposed to defending the company.
The new management team that was brought into customer relations decided to take a proactive role in retaining customers.
The best way to pursue that goal, it decided, was by making quick amends when a service failure occurred and by focusing the airline on spotting and eliminating the operational weaknesses that can cause service failures. The team subscribed to W. One of the first steps we had to take was to improve our understanding of why customers defected. Of much greater potential importance was what we learned about customers who had experienced problems.
For customer relations to achieve this goal, however, it would have to transform its culture and methods completely.
In its traditional defensive role, customer relations had served as an investigator and adjudicator and had pursued four basic objectives. The first was to insulate the company from unhappy customers. Accordingly, customer relations was highly centralized, conducted little analysis of customer data, and for the most part did not disseminate what it heard or learned.
The second was to assign blame for poor service rather than to help the organization, including product development, learn how to prevent or fix problems. As a result, line functions saw the department as an adversary.
Accordingly, the division had to adhere to detailed rules for compensation. The final objective was to maximize volume throughput—to process the largest possible number of customer complaints.
Customers certainly did not find customer relations easily accessible. To champion the customer, the new management team instituted four objectives. The second objective was to strive to prevent future service problems through teamwork. We tried to achieve this objective by having line operations join us in monthly reviews to discuss how customers were perceiving service quality, and by serving as active members of quality-improvement and product-development teams. Toward that end, we instituted a policy of dealing with all cases individually and began holding internal reviews each month to identify the most effective means of retaining customers.
A related fourth objective was to practice customer retention, not adjudication. The bottom line became preventing customer defection. It was translated into a modus operandi of retain, invest, prevent, which was incorporated into all training programs, coaching sessions, and performance criteria. Debating whether the customer was correctly perceiving the facts was a nonstarter. We had to deal with their perception if we were going to hold on to them. In training, we tried to help staff understand the following:.
To deal with these issues, customer relations developed a four-step process that we incorporated into all our technical and human systems. Apologize and own the problem. Customers do not care whose fault it was or who was to blame; they want an apology and they want someone to champion their cause. Do it quickly. Aim to reply to the customer the same day, and if that is not possible, certainly do it within 72 hours.
Assure the customer that the problem is being fixed. Customers can be retained if they are confident that the operational problem that they encountered will truly be addressed.
Do it by phone. We found that customers with problems were delighted to have customer relations call them. Because customer relations believed obtaining information and responding to complaints quickly were critically important for spotting and fixing systemic weaknesses, we invested in a reengineering effort that included the following:. An image-based computer system, Caress for Customer Analysis and Retention System eliminated all paper.
0コメント