Why british airways

But our research shows that customers now take the basics for granted and increasingly want a company to desire to help them, to treat them in a personal, caring way. Fulfilling those desires is the centerpiece of how we wish to orchestrate our service. I mean exactly that: arranging all the elements of our service so that they collectively generate a particular experience. We try to think about what kind of impression or feeling each interaction between the company and a customer will generate.

For instance, we ask our crews not to load up passengers with food and drinks and then disappear—not for cost reasons but so we can create additional personal contacts with the customer. According to our research, just seeing crew members creates higher customer-satisfaction levels.

We continually ask customers in focus groups to tell us what such an experience should look and feel like, and we have distilled their responses into service principles that are enshrined in two of our corporate goals. We want to create an airline with a global scope but a homey feel. When we found that many long-haul travelers felt poorly when they arrived at their destinations, we began our Well-Being in the Air program to help passengers combat fatigue and improve their circulation.

It consists of healthful meal choices and a video demonstrating exercises that customers can perform in their seats. Upon arriving in Britain, they can use our arrivals lounges, which are a major innovation. We maintain full arrival-lounge facilities at Heathrow and Gatwick, our prime network-hub airports; and at Birmingham, Glasgow, and Manchester airports we offer similar complimentary comforts at hotels adjacent to the airport terminals.

Many passengers arriving on long overnight flights need a place to go when their flights get in very early—before public transport or offices are open.

Our research revealed that they thought that airlines, including British Airways, took their money and dumped them without a care. In other words, we were not filling a value-driven need. Our main arrivals lounges at the London airports are used by an average of around customers each day. The Sleeper Service has been similarly well received. To varying extents, competitors are copying these initiatives, but British Airways enjoys the halo effect that comes from being first.

Not all potential customers will care about or value our approach to service. Using database-marketing techniques, we have focused more of our marketing effort on retaining those customers and increasing our share of their business.

Although other companies employ similar marketing techniques, we think ours are pretty sophisticated. First, we extensively and continuously study the market to pinpoint the segments that offer the possibility of generating a higher profit margin—segments such as business women, unaccompanied minors, and consultants—and identify those people among our customers.

Then we create extensive lifestyle profiles of each customer, which we use both to increase ticket purchases and to sell other products and services. But identifying such customers is only half the battle. Learning from them so you can design and improve services that they will highly value over time is the other half. A packaged-goods business has the most incredible market data available to it. In addition, so many human interactions are involved in producing an experience in a service business that it is often difficult to measure which interaction or series of interactions caused a customer to feel satisfied or dissatisfied.

On top of that, a customer may have a bad experience because of circumstances outside our control—a flight delay caused by bad weather, for example, or problems with air-traffic control. As a result, it is often difficult to know if a complaint is the result of an isolated event—perhaps one crew just having a bad day—or a systemic problem.

By creating an organization that excels in listening to its most valuable customers. By creating data that enable you to measure the kinds of performance that create value for those customers so you can improve performance and spot and correct any weaknesses. And by recognizing that the people on the front line are the ones who ultimately create value since they are the ones who determine the kinds of experiences that the company generates for its customers.

We focus intensively on the customer, and our marketing, our operating philosophy, and our performance measures reflect that. In several key places in our organization, we have created customer advocates: in our brand-management organization; in our marketplace performance unit, which is responsible for benchmarking our operations and collecting data; and in our customer relations department.

I guess the importance of brand management came home to me during my Norton Simon days, when I was responsible for Hunt-Wesson. That experience shaped the way I perceive service products. It helped me realize that instilling a brand culture is very important in a service business because a service business is all about serving people, who have values, ideals, and feelings. It helped me realize that we needed to see the product not simply as a seat but more comprehensively as an experience being orchestrated across the airline.

That orchestration was the brand. They oversee the process of refreshing the brands and are among those responsible for thinking of ways to innovate and improve services. We started to treat our categories of service as brands in the mids. We recognized that delivering consistent exceptional service was not enough—that service brands, like packaged-goods brands, need to be periodically refreshed to reinforce the message that the customer is receiving superior value for the money.

Refreshing your service is also a way to make sure you periodically reassess how the value you think you are delivering compares with the value customers think you are delivering. When we began, I thought the wear-out factor for a service brand was somewhere in the five-year range. Now I am pretty convinced that five years is about the maximum that you can go without refreshing the brand.

How does refreshing a service brand differ from refreshing a packaged-goods brand? For consumer products, refreshing the brand may only require different labeling. But refreshing a service brand so the customer will really recognize the change requires something major. For example, when we relaunched our Club Europe service recently, we added some of the best short-haul cuisine anywhere in the world to meet the needs of the numerous culinary cultures across Europe and added nine new airport lounges throughout Europe.

In addition, we created the most ergonomic short-haul seat around, a telephone check-in service, and a valet-parking service.

We did it because we wanted to stay ahead so that we could continue to win premium customers. Refreshing a brand also might mean a complete revamp of in-flight entertainment. For example, when we refreshed our World Traveller, or economy class, brand last year, we completely overhauled the audio and video channels.

We are currently creating interactive video services for our new Boeing s. Customers will be able to complain to our customer relations department in-flight, order duty-free goods, gamble, get the latest news on business, fashion, and so forth. It always amazes us how U. We have invested millions to research, develop, and deliver products to serve particular market segments and to build up brand equity.

We need to get a healthy return on that investment so we can continue to reinvest. Conversely, upgrading people out of World Traveller would not add value to that service and would detract from our ability to focus on the needs of those customers, which are very different from the needs of those who travel Club.

If getting an upgrade is the only way a customer feels he or she can get value, then our World Traveller brand is not doing its job, and we will have long-term commodity problems like our U. They see that management is genuinely committed to delivering high-quality service.

Our employees want to be proud of their product and they want to feel that they are making a difference to customers. When competitors surpass our product, and especially when customers tell them so, our employees become upset.

They are very vocal in letting management know about such situations. They really are committed to delivering quality. They want to be part of a winning team. British Airways has a reputation for listening to customers more effectively than many other airlines. How do you listen? Of course, we do many things that lots of companies do.

Our senior managers, myself included, consciously try to talk to a lot of our passengers when we fly and move around London and the world at large. We also conduct customer forums to help us continually improve our current products and services and to help us identify services that we should consider developing over the longer term.

In these forums, we ask customers to let their imagination, anger, enthusiasm, and ideas flow so we can capture their thoughts about current as well as emergent issues.

Over the years, I have seen a lot of marketing people who had been very successful in the packaged-goods business fail in the service business because, as I said, it is so difficult to get reliable data. My attitude was, If the information does not exist, create it. So in , we formed what we call our marketplace performance unit. We also are trying to learn from customers by tapping a source of information that many service companies do not exploit fully: customer complaints, suggestions, and compliments.

We have transformed customer relations from a defensive complaint department into a department of customer champions whose mission is to retain customers. See p. Both approachability and responsiveness strongly influence customer loyalty. I ardently believe that customer complaints are precious opportunities to hold on to customers who otherwise might take their business elsewhere and to learn about problems that need to be fixed. Customers who make the effort to register a complaint are doing you a favor because they are giving you an opportunity to retain them, if you act quickly.

Many service businesses suffer from a problem: the lack of comparative data to measure and benchmark operating performance. It issues a monthly report, which goes to the chairman, the managing director, the CFO, and the top management team responsible for service and performance. Besides reporting on the key performance indicators key operating data , the report typically has a section that focuses on a particular problem or issue. For example, it might examine a service, such as in-flight food, or it might address how British Airways is faring on a specific route, or it might evaluate the effectiveness of a particular ad campaign.

The marketplace performance unit measures the entire time it takes for a customer to get through to an agent, including the time the phone is ringing and the time the customer is on hold until he or she is transferred to an available agent. In contrast, airlines with a management perspective might measure only how many times the phone rings before the system answers it. Waiting lines at check-in desks furnish another example.

An airline with a management perspective might measure the number of minutes it took for customers to get to the front of the line.

But when the marketplace performance unit asked customers, it found they were more concerned with the length of the lines and the rate at which they moved. The marketplace performance unit also provides a critical means of measuring improvement in customer service. If a customer happens to be a peanut buff, the worse thing that can happen on a short domestic flight is for that person not to be offered a packet of peanuts.

This attention to detail led British Airways to overhaul the food service on its flights between Britain and Japan. The unit also learned that the Japanese prefer to eat small amounts of food relatively frequently and that what they really love in the middle of the night are pot noodles, a kind of noodle stew.

When the unit has identified a problem, it presents its findings to senior managers, who then debate the possible solutions and create a plan of action. For example, when a competitor began offering free limousine service to business-class and first-class customers arriving on long-haul flights, management asked the unit to determine whether British Airways should follow suit.

What they really wanted on arrival after a long night flight, they said, was a place to freshen up and relax until it was time to leave for their business appointments. This discovery led British Airways to establish airport facilities to which overnight passengers arriving in Britain on intercontinental flights could go.

You mentioned that it is difficult to deliver a consistent experience in a service business because numerous interactions between individual employees and the customer shape the experience.

You hinted that achieving such consistency can produce a significant advantage that will be hard for competitors to copy. Delivering long-term and consistent value in a service business begins and ends with the way employees are trained, nurtured, and led. We have a rigorous process for selecting new employees. Just as important is leadership; our managers are continually trained in leadership and in techniques to provide high-quality service.

Finally, we have established performance criteria—we call them key performance indicators— that each team must fulfill.

They are based on research on the level of performance we must achieve to remain efficient and to win repeat business. They ensure a focus on facts as opposed to personal perceptions.

These practices may not sound unique, but we think we take them much more seriously than many companies do. We strongly believe that to deliver consistent service quality, our employees must understand their role in delivering superior service and must have the power and ability to deal with customer problems.

Teams must receive constant feedback on their service interactions. Toward that end, we hand out survey cards to passengers on every flight, and every day we ask a random sample of passengers who have just finished their flights to comment on our service quality. The person in charge of the cabin crew, the customer service director, receives this information, as does the crew, and it is used to assess performance and to identify training needs.

How do you get employees to understand and then deliver superior consistent service? By giving them the freedom to act within specified boundaries. If you react quickly and in the most positive way, you can get very high marks from the customer. Recovery matters as much as trying to provide good service, since occasional service failure is unavoidable in a business like ours.

We want every employee who interacts with customers to listen to them and to be able to address issues that arise immediately. Consider the following incident: An aircraft door was left open in a rainstorm before takeoff, and a passenger near the door unfortunately got showered. We try to make it clear to employees that we expect them to respond to customers on the spot—before a customer writes a letter or makes a phone call.

We created a series of training programs on the importance of good customer service and how to provide it. 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. Be first to find out about our latest vacancies by using our job alerts.

You can create an account here. A place to show your best We are a hour business, operating days of the year, all around the world. Information for International candidates. Investing in tomorrow Our lovely, talented people make us what we are, delivering the unique British Airways service to keep us in the hearts of customers around the world.

You get a taste for these things. Perhaps you could help us achieve another gong next year? Earn Live Save. Share in our success. Individual bonuses are given in line with our financial, operational, customer and personal performance. Flexible Benefits Scheme. Our new flexible benefits scheme is available to colleagues and will offer a range of benefits to choose from including a market-leading defined contribution DC pension, helping you save for the future.

The scheme gives colleagues choice and more control over your benefits and how you spend the contributions that you will receive from British Airways. The range of benefits to choose from include - critical illness cover, childcare vouchers, cycle to work, additional life insurance cover, private medical insurance, dental plan and healthcare cash plan. Fly the World Staff Travel. Taxes and charges apply. Cargo Concession. Wellbeing sponsors and advisers across British Airways promote a number of wellbeing and inclusion initiatives.

We also offer a variety of other benefits to help you develop as a professional, and stay healthy and productive. Flexible Working. Line managers consider all submitted requests for part-time working, job sharing or working from home in line with business and operational requirements. You can enjoy special discounts and savings on a range of products such as hotels and phones to tie in with your staff travel trip. Season Ticket Loans.

Public transport season tickets offer considerable cost savings and convenience, although a substantial initial outlay is required. We offer interest-free loans to purchase season tickets. Heathrow Express. Car Parking. At our Westbase site near Heathrow, you can park for free for up to two weeks when you go on holiday — a big saving!

Also, most of our work locations around the UK offer free parking subject to space for colleagues while at work. BA Clubs. Provide a wide variety of sports and leisure facilities, with free membership in your first year. Get involved in anything from athletics to yachting, angling to yoga. Many of our offices have subsidised restaurant facilities. Learning and Development Every role at British Airways comes with the scope to learn and grow. Doing the right thing A better future for our planet 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.

Wellbeing matters We want our colleagues to feel and perform at their best, even on a cold February evening when most people are tucked up at home in front of the telly. Giving back at home and abroad As a British business with a global presence, we understand our responsibility to others at home and abroad.

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