In the second of this British Airways series, we look where British Airways fall short. We’ve seen what they do well in part 1, but it’s not enough to keep the 45 million customers choosing to fly with BA every year. Many will look for alternatives, and there’s plenty of options.
BA flights are premium price but customer experience is at budget airline levels. What’s wrong and how can British Airways fix it?
In the Channel 5, four part documentary ‘British Airways 24/7- Access all areas’ CEO Alex Cruz said ‘When we make mistakes, we need to learn from those mistakes, and quickly’. Uh-huh.
There is only one bad thing about British Airways and that is the level of ‘customer service’
British Airways are huge, every 90 seconds a BA flight takes off somewhere in the world. They have flights to 200 cities. Imagine the logistics, the booking, the pilots, the staff, planes, food, passengers, languages, airports – everything needs to work as planned – mindblowing how all that come’s together. Like everything in life – sometimes the wheels come off (not actually come off, that would be really bad). Everyone understands shit happens, whether it’s weather delays, lost baggage, missed connections, or even pilots strikes. It’s the handling of these (not surprising) issues that British Airways executes so badly. Let’s look at some examples.
The pilots strike. What a complete badly judged circus the handling of this has been. How could such an established Company have turned a challenge into a disaster, and every time Alex Cruz is interviewed on TV, he further enrages the public. He is either getting stitched up by his PR team or he is arrogantly ignoring good advice. Either way it’s doing long term damage to BA’s chance of surviving another 10 years let alone 100.
British Airways successfully managed to ‘negotiate’ their way to September strikes, missing the peak holiday season and saving many family holiday cancellations (and lessening the financial impact for BA of course). There is (was) a lot of public sympathy for BA effectively being held to ransom by the pilots and unions. After all, many of the passengers live in the real world where pay rises are more of a bonus these days and if you are not happy with your role, pay or conditions, you look for a job elsewhere. The strikes were not a surprise for British Airways. A carefully thought out strategy for the announcement, with the customers at the forefront, would have made a dramatic difference to the situation we are in now. Sympathy now is swinging towards the pilots. Maybe BA’s treatment of staff is on a par with their treatment of customers?
The announcement from British Airways – This was done on a Friday evening, rushed out to avoid triggering the ‘flight cancelled within 14 days’ compensation claim. Fair enough. It’s going to cost BA a fortune anyway, why add compensation claims. HOWEVER apart from wrong information where some passengers were mistakenly informed their flight was cancelled, there were not enough customer service advisors to answer calls and no real, true information about what passengers’ options and rights were. A simple ‘management of expectations and information announcement’ would have helped so many people. ‘We are really sorry, we hoped it wouldn’t come to this, we are going to try and answer as many calls as we can but don’t panic if you can’t get through straight away, we will get you rebooked at our cost and this is what you need to do etc’.
British Airways. Maximising greed, minimising Joy. Cost reducing exercises like outsourcing IT and Call centres abroad have saved BA millions for sure but at what cost? No customers = no airline. Where there is another option, the thousands of people will choose it, every bad experience will be shared with friends, family, colleagues and more devastatingly on social media. One bad customer experience could easily put off a hundred people from booking with BA.
General customer service when there is no strike is shockingly bad. It is the absolute text book reading of how not to treat your customers. It would seem from the outside that their motto is to ignore, frustrate and insult the customer until they give up. BA could now stand for Budget Airline, Bloody Awful, Blatantly Arrogant, Borderline Atrocity. Many people are appalled by British Airways. There are websites dedicated to making people aware of BA’s failings, and twitter accounts where aggrieved customers can share their stories. Like @BritishAirwaysSucks. Yet their facebook page has over 3 million likes. BA do a lot right for sure, but the vocal angry minority do more damage to a brand than the happy majority.
Always, it is not the problem itself but the handling of the problem that drives people crazy.
British Airways themselves have their own customer service twitter account. It’s excellent, it’s like someone at BA said, lets have a twitter account, lets deal with our customers in the most condescending, unhelpful way possible, let’s not allow any decency, compassion, morals or logic to get in the way of making money. Lets use ‘it’s clearly in the T&Cs’ and ‘sorry for your disappointment but F off’ to do this. Have a look through their feed, it’s almost hilarious. Marvellous.
Call centres. Unless you are ringing to buy a flight, you will reach an overseas call centre, that is, when you can get through. I have had a few issues with British Airways over the last year or so, I have found their call centres appallingly unhelpful, frustrating and expensive – an hours call from my mobile added over £50 to my phone bill. And the issue was not even sorted. AAARGH. It is unclear whether their staff are trained to respond with a total lack of customer care or are they not trained properly at all. A simple retraining exercise would fix this issue…….but that would cost British Airways money.
Online enquiries. Again customers are encouraged to fill out an online form. Then wait…. and wait, usually for a response that totally fails to address the issue or solve the problem. First BA need to give a time expected response time. Manage expectations. Ok it’s not great to get an email saying we will respond within 3 weeks but that’s far better than checking your email every day and waiting, with no idea. When dealing with an issue, the question at the top of the list should be ‘what if this was my mum, how would I talk to her, how could I fix this for her?’ Treat every customer like it’s your Mum and the world will be a much happier place. And British Airways customer care would be the best.
British Airways call themselves ‘The worlds favourite Airline’. I do wonder where that accolade came from. We have already seen in my article ‘Most dangerous adverts on TV’ how the truth can be, lets say, manipulated. I am guessing that it was some award voted for by BA staff. In 1989.
But there is hope, yes big changes need to be made from the top. As Alex Cruz said ‘Lessons need to be learned from these mistakes, and quickly.’
There are likely to be more strikes announced as the Pilots can now strike with 14 days notice and no ballot until January 2020. If you know what to expect when booking flights and hotels separately or what do if your flight is cancelled or delayed then that’s a lot of unnecessary stress removed. Be prepared!
So that’s British Airways – the bad. Catch up with Part one – What British Airways do well. As is part 2 ‘we spent £386 for seats, Crazy?’ and coming soon is ‘How we got a refund for non- refundable seats’ (Yes, I actually got a refund for ‘Non refundable’ seat bookings – eventually!). Let me know in the comments what good experiences you’ve had with British Airways. I know there must be plenty. T
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