Q&A: Improving Customer Relations at US Airways
John Romantic is the director of customer relations and central
baggage resolution at US Airways. But he'd prefer that you simply
think of him as your advocate at the airline. For the last nine
months, he's had the unenviable job of improving the carrier's
checkered reputation for customer service. Contributing editor
Christopher Elliott asked him how he's doing it.
I've been hearing a lot of buzz about some of the
changes within US Airways, when it comes to handling customer service
questions. And I've seen a marked decrease in reader complaints. What
are you doing?
We are doing a lot, and we're glad there is
a buzz starting.
My goal when taking my position nine months ago was to transform
customer relations from a complaint resolution center into a customer
advocacy center. Better said, while we handle customer inquiries, we
also need to globally understand customer sentiment and use all of
that data to look at our product, policies, and processes. Our focus
is to find ways to be easier to do business with.
How?
We code 100 percent of the customer
responses we receive, and have created better reporting from this
data. We have established an executive steering committee which meets
regularly with the primary focus of understanding our customers'
feedback, and finding ways to improve our customers' experience
resulting in reduced complaints. The work of this team has lead to
several recent changes - with some still in progress.
We realize we have a little more ground to make up on customer
complaint rankings, but our actions are starting to close the gap with
our competitors.
How many requests does your department handle in
an average week? Can you break it down by phone, fax, letter and
e-mail, please?
The actual number of requests varies by
time of the year, load factor, peak and off-peak times. But the
current breakdown is 91 percent handled via e-mail, 5 percent via
phone and 4 percent via fax or written correspondence.
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