Letter of advice on how customer service in BA can be improved

I am writing to offer you some advice on how customer service in BA can be improved. Your Chief Executive, Mr Willie Walsh, suggested I write to you because he was impressed with my suggestions about monitoring and evaluating customer service. The four areas I will focus on are:

1. Improvements to quality

2. Reliability

3. Improvements to the organisation

4. Improvements to employees

There are many ways in which you can improve the quality of your service in BA. Firstly I believe the introduction of extra staff training will highly benefit your company and in turn help improve your customer service. For instance all staff should be trained to deal with difficult customers; this can be very disruptive to the clientele and furthermore create a negative image for BA. If all staff is trained in this area it will mean that procedures can run smoothly and disruptive customers can be dealt with effectively. As well as this staff should be trained in helping people with special needs such as elderly, disabled, or young children. It is important that they are treated the same as regular customers and treated with due care and attention. This will attract attention to your company as people will know that your company is customer focused and has high levels of customer service for all types of people.

Moreover you could introduce policies such as the introduction of new rules that will set higher expectations from your staff. This can include approaching as many customers as possible and asking them if they need any assistance in areas such as check-in. This will improve customer service levels as you can ensure that everyone is following the rules that have been set and in turn you can add more rules and regulations that will ensure that all staff is doing the same thing throughout your business. To each individual team you can set monthly targets, this will allow you to monitor the section and then create more objectives you plan for them to reach. This will benefit customers because each group of people will have objectives that they need to achieve and will be monitored throughout their progress to ensure the highest quality customer service is provided.

As I suggested in a letter to your chief executive Mr Willie Walsh, the use of mystery shoppers and surveys will highly benefit your company in terms of customer service. These two methods will identify areas where there are problems and will allow you to put in the correct measures so this can be improved. For example if a mystery shopper identified that the staff were unfriendly, this will mean you can put in place training and/or aims and objectives and allow you to fix this issue. This will make your customer service more reliable because it will mean that it is aimed at certain aspects that have been pointed out as being under par.

However it is also necessary for management to focus on customer service. This will help keep staff happy as they know that the management care about the service provided to customers and will in turn encourage them to adopt the same style. As well as this it can also improve levels of customer loyalty, this is because customers will feel that they are being treated very well and the staff are ensuring that the customer’s needs are met to the highest standard. This will not only boost the amount of return customers but also give BA the reputation of being customer focused. This will also attract customers that usually use other airlines increasing the popularity of your business and in turn the reputation of BA will grow. This will lead to increased sales as there will be a high volume of customers and consequently this will create increased profits.

Finally I believe it is imperative that you train and develop your staff as this will allow you to gain the most from them. It will improve the levels of customer service they provide, and mean that they are more confident with their job roles. Secondly they will be motivated to work hard and self evaluate their performance. If each and every member of staff does this it will improve the whole of BA’s performance and make it become a more successful company.

For instance if a member of staff has been trained in customer service, they will be confident when communicating with the customer and providing information (such as ticket information, baggage information), when they are positively rewarded by the customer (through language and expression) they will feel motivated to work even harder and will become critical of their own work and make sure it is to the best quality, and if not then try to improve it.

This will mean that staff will constantly try to achieve the best that they can and provide excellent service. In comparison, a member of staff who has not been trained in customer service will be unsure about the way they should talk to the customer and will therefore feel unconfident with the work they are being asked to do. This will lead to them not being motivated to work hard which will make the quality of their work even worse. All in all this will mean that BA is being represented badly through its staff.