Jim Collins recently sent me his latest book, How The Mighty Fall, which I have not managed to prise off my wife yet. If he’d written a British version of this book, it would have to feature BA. British Airways. How on earth has the greatest British brand fallen out of the skies to such depths of despair?
I asked a couple of members of the BA staff, does BA stand for Bloody Awful, after the worst experience I have ever encountered of substandard behaviour by representatives of BA.
I was checking in proudly to my first class seats at the BA counter in Manchester, when I met the second rudest woman I have ever had the misfortune to meet. We had telephoned the night before just to ask advice on the recently introduced ESTA. (An official government document required if you are flying to or through America.) The advice we were given by BA was “don’t worry about it, arrive at check-in in the morning and we will deal with it then as technically you don’t need one as you are not staying in the US.”
We trusted the advice and when checking in, told the lady at the First Class counter why we had not filled out the ESTA as per our instructions from the BA staff the previous night. At this point she categorically refused to check us onto the flight and promptly blanked us. I asked for help, and pleaded with her for someone more senior who could assist.
Enter (stage right) the rudest woman I have ever met. She arrived with a plastic smile that she maintained for the best part of 45 seconds before laying into my wife who was beautiful in her calmness. The BA official told us we should have filled out the ESTA online and that we should have and I quote, “put that you are staying in Miami in the destination box.” I explained that our final destination was the British Virgin Islands, I didn’t dare tell her it was Necker. “we advise people who are traveling through the US to the Caribbean to put down they are staying in the Continental in Miami.”
I explained that this would be incorrect and that this was a US official immigration department document!
Without another word the 2 rude BA staff disappeared.
We were kept waiting 40 minutes. Powerless and no other members of BA staff were prepared to help. When we asked for help, they said, “we are not getting involved.”
It really was like a farce. And if she hadn’t made my 6 year old burst into tears I’d have have been laughing in disbelief. We had turned up to enjoy the first class experience.
Enter Simon, a scruffily dressed man in jeans and a creased polo shirt. ”Because of the delay at check in and that my staff members had not known how to deal with the ESTA, we are able to board this flight to Heathrow, but unfortunately it was now too late to attach the luggage to the connecting flight.”
He advised us that he had personally seen to it that the plane to Miami would wait for us. He apologised for the behavior of the 2 staff and he assured me we would be met by ground staff and hurried through at the other end.
It was clear this man just wanted rid of the situation. He was working on the principal, Out of Sight Out of mind. (perhaps a new management course BA are running)
My 6 year old asked me , “Daddy, why was that lady so rude?” and I was unable to defend her.
This farce had actually delayed the plane leaving Manchester and stressed 100 or so other people also connecting to Miami and other destinations.
On arrival at Heathrow, there were no ground staff waiting to assist us between the planes. Luckily everyone else just managed to get their flight to Miami, but no surprise, we missed ours waiting for our luggage.
I saw the striking BA logo with the words CUSTOMER SERVICE in massive letters. Fantastic I thought. I’ll pop over and get some help. The 2 ladies (who reminded me of Les Dawson’s characters) with folded arms grunted back at me when I politely said, “I don’t suppose you can help and tell me where to go, we have missed our flight.”
“We’re baggage.” I continued and the other one piped up, “have you a problem with your baggage?” “No” I replied, “well we can’t help you then. Like my friend told you we are baggage” They carried on talking and I couldn’t help pointing out the irony in how they described themselves.
Walking away I pondered, does BA stand for Bloody Awful. It should do!
Eventually after a series of equally idiotic encounters with various Bloody Awful staff I found someone who was lovely. She was kind and called Jeanette. However the damage was done. The brand was dead in my eyes.
She did start quite hard like the first Bloody Awful staff in Manchester, telling us that as we had missed the flight and it was more than likely non refundable. First class tickets can be as much as £9000 each I didn’t dare ask Gail how much she had paid. I must have turned white with the sick feeling. 4 tickets wasted. 3 demoralised girls, 2 hours extra waiting and 1 missed flight! Jeanette quickly realised what had happened.
She explained the check in staff in Manchester were all agency staff. She fixed the ESTA issue in a few minutes putting “IN TRANSIT” in the destination box.
She went on to explain they had not had a pay rise in 2 years and that they had no idea if their jobs would even be here tomorrow. “The spirit is dead, and I am so sorry you have had all this trouble.”
Every cloud has a silver lining. And thank God, Jeanette booked us on to a Virgin Atlantic seat. One of our daughters, the 3 year old had some sort of anaphylactic reaction on the plane and needed emergency care. 2 doctors on board helped out giving her adrenalin injections, oxygen and salbutamol. Nikki, the Upper Class Senior Cabin Crew team leader was amazing, along with her team particularly Ross and Sacha.
We sat on the floor of the cabin outside the cockpit. The captain regularly came out to check on our 3 year olds well-being and after nearly the entire flight she recovered miraculously as kids do!
So how does something so great, become so Bloody Awful? Fancy not rewarding your staff and undermining them so they don’t know if their jobs are safe. I can’t imagine the people at the top have had similar pay problems?
British Airways is overweight in some areas and anorexic in others.
In our business if you have a potential weakness in an area you invest in it, and you allocate the best, strongest most aligned individuals. You certainly don’t cut back. The problem with BA is they have multiple areas of weakness, so as fast as you build relations with the likes of Jeanette you have sledge hammer Customer Services or disconnected agency staff with their own challenges. Invariably you destroy the brand value.
I think one of the issues BA also has is whilst they are busy infighting, arguing over pay and bureaucracy, the Virgin Atlantic team is taking conflict very seriously indeed. Going about their business with the Sun Tzu approach.
“He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks.”
Well, in my mind BA does stand for Bloody Awful and although I have enough free airmiles to fly around the world 7 times, I’d sooner pay to fly a proper airline. Britain’s best airline Virgin. And I wouldn’t swap our seat on the floor next to the loo for a BA Experience.
Lawrence Jones
UKFast
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There’s nothing more disappointing than choosing a brand specifically for it’s lauded qualities and then being slapped in the face with poor service like this. And if their work ethos across the board continues to spiral it won’t be long before the other airlines move in for the kill and British Airways becomes but a memory. If we’re not careful before long Ryan Air will become the only option for sky travel!
I think BA are a shadow of their former self and every time I fly I am always amaze at how rude their staff are.
History is littered with examples of great companies that have, overtime, lost their way under the mis-direction of a poor senior management team. It is one of the perils of becoming a ‘super brand’.
When the brand identity alone becomes the most powerful source of influence, companies sit back on their laurels, become distracted and lose focus on the basic fundamentals of good business. And when this happens, ultimately you are just selling disappointment, because reality will never live up the perceptions and expectations that people have of a brand. BA is on that slippery slope and their brand may not be enough to save them. Worse still, their very actions are now damaging the one thing that is compensating for their appauling delivery – the brand.
Bransons philosophy of splitting companies off and keeping them at an ‘impactive’ size enables them to retain their focus, passion and drive. The quality of thought and the understanding of customers needs at the most senior levels within Virgin Group is a clear differential between Bransons companies and their competitors. The philosophies of BA and Virgin seem worlds apart and it would appear from your experience Lawrence, that those differences are very evident in the standards they maintain.
Having recently flown Virgin Upper Class to South Africa I can confirm that they know how to deliver amazing customer service.
Loz
Does not surprise me at all – have the misfortune to fly BA too many times and suffer terrible service and high and mighty attitudes and for what!!!
Flew Silverjet to New York fantastic service but alas no more – BA should have sent their senior team on their flights to see how it was done!
Business class with Virgin and American to SF have been fab in the past and will never fly BA again – ill stick to better carrier in future..
Necker what are you like…………….
Have a blast Jono
I too have found BA to be very disappointing. My new husband and I were returning from our honeymoon and at the check in desk we were told that we would have to sit separately – not even in adjacent rows, we would be at different ends of the aeroplane for the 9 hour flight! As a very nervous passenger, I asked if there was any way around this and was told it by a rude BA staff “it’s not our problem.”
This story rings very true. You mention Jim Collin’s latest book at the top. If you consider BA and Virgin as the British equivalents of Wal-Mart and Ames, there is a very telling moral.
I would doubt that today many people, especially in the UK will have heard of Ames – but in the seventies, Wal-Mart and Ames were the two high flying convenience chains. However, there was a striking difference between their values as businesses.
The directorship and senior management at Ames were complacent. They didn’t believe that they had anything to learn. They had a formula that worked and they were not swerved from their path by changes in industries or user habits. They basically were not listening because they didn’t think that they had to.
Wal-Mat on the other hand never stopped asking questions, researching their markets, talking to consumers, employees, competitors and striving to reach new levels of satisfaction and delivery.
This progressive approach has led them to be one of the largest companies in the world today, while Ames literally fell off the chart…
The Virgin Group seems to always ask the questions, while BA just doesn’t seem to be listening.
Look forward to catching up when we are back.
I don’t think not getting a pay increase had anything to do with the lack of customer service or individual attitudes. I think all state-owned airlines are the same. The employees know nothing you say can get them sacked. At max they will be sent home for a few days with pay!
But the thread is interesting in that UKFast’s own Sales chat (powered by LivePerson) is less than helpful when compared to a US budget provider like Netfirms (who don’t use LivePerson). Your rep wasn’t able to confirm something simple like a server setting unless I was “added as point of contact on the account.” And this after the rep initiated the chat with ” Welcome to UKFast how can I help?”
Not very helpful wouldn’t you say?
The “carrot or the stick” is an interesting discussion and probably worthy of its own blog. I used Virgin Atlantic to highlight how poor BA service is. However, Virgin, UKFast and all businesses in the UK are all governed by the same laws. We all have same constraints we have to work with.
The problem might be that BA have neither the carrot or the stick and they simply have week management who do not understand how to engage their staff. The manager at BA I met clearly was not someone I’d consider a high enough calibre person to manage and motivate people at UKFast. We simply all have different standards.
As far as I am aware BA is not state owned, yet….. but, you never know. As you implied, a state owned business does not have a track record of inspiring it’s workforce.
With regards to the carrot or the stick approaches. I am not a fan of the stick method. I think people respond to fear, but they respond negatively.
I have 2 great dogs. Indie and Lara, they are Boxers and they have a huge amount of energy. They are big too and with 2 small children (one new born when they both arrived as puppies) they need to be very well trained.
My dogs sit where they are told for as long as they want, they will not start eating until they are told to, they also attack on command. Sadly, I have not got this quite right as they both attack me at the moment! But how have I done this? Through reward based training. If they do something good, they get a treat. If they do something bad, they don’t. Eventually they stop doing silly things.
I think us humans are not too dissimilar. Shout at us and we get stressed and defensive. There are much better ways to inspire our teams.
On the second point regarding the team at UKFast using Liveperson. This is indeed a tricky situation. This is about managing expectations.
The team managing the LivePerson are our receptionists. So just like when you ring up and someone at UKFast says “Hello, how may I help you?” they simply do the same via the live chat facility.
If you ask a tricky question to a receptionist, you will need time for them to figure out who is the best person to answer this. I think the problem here is 2 fold,
1. your expectation of what the UKFast employee is able to do at this stage is too high
2. UKFast has not made it clear enough that this is a receptionist, trying to point you in the right direction.
Govind, I can see from your site you are a man who knows his stuff. What you are wanting is a simple answer to a simple question. It is simple in your eyes, but that’s because this is your dedicated profession.
I have teams of people who would have enjoyed speaking with you at length on your chosen subject and beyond. Sadly we were not able to match you to the right person on this occasion, but I wouldn’t write UKFast off, due to this small miscommunication.
The service a UKFast customer gets is significantly higher in my opinion than any other business in our sector. I am confident of this as we have clients who host on both our network and the other top provider too. The vast majority move their entire infrastructure over to us. I know we have not branded ourselves “fanatical” but our clients know our passion for the job in hand.
And that being said, we are a million miles away from where we need to be. And your feedback is already winging its way back to the UK, back to the group who manage the Reception and Live chat facility. Each week we ask the question, “how can we make this better?” Well, if it’s any consolation, your comments are helping shape UKFast. So Thank you.
Kind regards
Lawrence J