BA’s latest Head of Customer Experience resigns – after a year

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• David S says:

  12 May12 May 08:43

  I’m a BA Shareholder and would love them to spend more on Customer Service. In the end, happy customers should lead to fuller planes and more profits and funding for greater investments in both hard and soft products.
  I think Rob should have a competition to set the new guys objectives for the first 12 months. What do we want him to do assuming he has the funds available?

  • Rob says:

    12 May12 May 09:01

    He won’t have the funds available.

    If you had the funds this would be the best job in the world. Without the funds it is probably the worst.

    • NickAnon says:

      12 May12 May 09:18

      ‘Some’ customer service would be good, they are currently offering me zero. Zero customer service.
      Return leg been cancelled, offered nothing in replacement. No option to change in manage my booking, just says “you can find a different flight”. No, I cannot find a different flight.
      “contact us”? Hahaha! yeah, right. Phone up and “we cant help you at the moment, goodbye”
      I have taken a day off today so I can spend *all day* on the phone trying to book a flight home.

      • Londonsteve says:

        12 May12 May 15:44

        They did the same with me. You’ve been categorised as a ‘customer we don’t want to keep’ and they are guiding your hand towards requesting a refund. I presume your fare booked into a low booking class or was a reward seat redemption? I have a cash booking with them in June that I’m considering cancelling out of spite, rebooking with someone else for much less money (it’s a CE booking and I’m happy to fly an LCC for a fraction of the price; I was only flying CE to collect tier points but as they are such a shambolic company I don’t think I want to make the effort).

    • Mikeact says:

      12 May12 May 09:35

      So, he can only play around with the pot already in place, or is there no pot ? In which case, why would anybody take a job like that, apart from a probably decent pay-off at the end and something else lined up.

  • Nick says:

    12 May12 May 09:21

    You can’t possibly be a BA shareholder because 100% of those shares are owned by IAG.

    • Andy in Cheshire says:

      12 May12 May 12:17

      You *can* be an IAG shareholder

  • Callum says:

    13 May13 May 12:29

    Is that just a hunch, or have you actually researched/found some research that backs that up?

    People have been saying the same thing on here for over a decade, predicting their imminent demise as we must now be approaching the millionth “last straw”, yet year after year after year profits and passenger numbers increased regardless.

    As much as a small subset of people on here greatly care about service levels etc, it should be pretty obvious to anyone that the majority of the market simply does not. Hence why Ryanair alone carries more passengers than all the IAG airlines combined (and to make it fairer given they don’t fly long haul, more passenger kms than BA).

• sayling says:

  12 May12 May 09:10

  So where is Tom going – has he got a new job already lined up?

  • Rhys says:

    12 May12 May 09:44

    Rumours are he’s off to the Middle East

• Aziz says:

  12 May12 May 09:13

  I know Calum as I handed a role over to him many years ago. He’s an incredibly smart guy and very passionate about the airline industry. We haven’t spoken for a long time but he’s a fantastic choice for this role. If he’s got the budget to improve things I’ve no doubt we’ll see some real improvements.

  • Rob says:

    12 May12 May 10:24

    The problem is that it’s easy to count money going out and not easy to count money coming in. Would BA sell more premium tickets if the food and drink in Club and F improved? Yes. Can you ever prove that the extra spend on F&B drove more ticket sales? No. BA therefore treats it as money down the toilet.

• Jon says:

  12 May12 May 09:21

  If he wants to improve the customer experience with minimal budget, a quick win might be to brief/train all the customer service agents, and anyone customer-facing for that matter, on the statutory rights conferred by EU/UK261. I daresay empowering them to properly inform customers of their rights, and willingly provide them, rather than forcing people to go to CEDR and/or MCOL, or settle for a refund because they don’t know any better, might at least help to slow down the destruction of BA’s reputation, and maybe take some pressure off the call centres.

  But of course he won’t be allowed to because that would mean BA actually having to comply with its legal obligations, which would cost money.

  • JDB says:

    12 May12 May 14:16

    Most companies across most sectors don’t advise customers of their statutory rights and they all operate the same complaints triage, probably shaking off 80% of them completely and dealing with the remainder unhelpfully until forced by a third party. If you ran a company, would you operate differently?

    • Jon says:

      12 May12 May 14:40

      I suppose it would depend how much I valued the company’s reputation and how much importance I placed on not p*ssing off my customers… So I guess we know where BA stands on those two 😉

      Thing is, EU/UK261 explicitly requires that airlines must inform customers of their statutory rights. So even just by failing to do that, BA is breaking the law, aside from any moral/ethical/reputational arguments for doing the right thing. But I suppose law-breaking in high places is par for the course these days… 😉

• Mike says:

  12 May12 May 09:39

  Some improvements in customer service would cost nothing like ensuring boarding groups are honoured. The domestic leg queue of any journey is usually a circus and that’s before we get to the clown car.

  • sayling says:

    12 May12 May 09:45

    I’ve always thought the clown car makes a complete mockery of the group boarding idea anyway – first to board the bus, last to leave it.

    What’s the point?

  • Blair Waldorf Salad says:

    12 May12 May 09:53

    So true. Such a small but easy step. Last week I had groups 1-3 called together and clearly all-comers got up to board but there’s absolutely no attwmot to turn them back. And frankly any airline that uses a bus gate but doesn’t provide a segregated bus is dead to me. But, as with many others here, BA are my only option to fly in/fly out of LHR and LGW.

    • Blair Waldorf Salad says:

      12 May12 May 09:54

      *attempt

  • Andrew. says:

    12 May12 May 10:52

    It’s slightly different at the moment, but a Friday early evening domestic to Edinburgh is pretty much 150 passengers with Gold priority status and a handful of seats for people without status.

    On Monday on an EDI to LCY flight, we were called in group order. Well group 1 and then everyone else. It was fairly lightly loaded so was quick through the gate. But. We then stood for 15 minutes on the stairs as the airport was short of ground crew. The flight still arrived on time.

• David says:

  12 May12 May 09:57

  Customer experience is woven through the entire business but how much can this role do in isolation? (And with no budget …)

  The challenges today are driven by staffing and IT among other things. How much is directly under the control of this position?

• lee says:

  12 May12 May 10:38

  I have a BA amex offer on card for £100 off a £500 spend .

  Will it work on booking a flight for 2 adults plus 1 nights accommodation on BA.com or do they separate the payments ?

• Richie says:

  12 May12 May 11:07

  I remember Go-Fly, great flights with cafetiere coffee and an empty stansted. Good luck Calum.

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