My lessons from Jetstar Customer Care continue. So adding to the principles from my last blog I now have more ideas on how (not) to look after customers.
Dripping taps
It’s now been more than a week since I raised an incident on their site. Since then I have discussed it with colleagues, friends, been on social media sites, and written a blog. While I may not be a major media outlet, I am still a dripping tap.
Which means that there are now hundreds of people out there who have seen my comments. Not that it will have much impact, but it will continue until resolved.
Tipping point
I don’t know how many dripping taps it will take before a company has a reputation for shocking service, but based on Jetstar Customer Care principles shown so far, I can see that a tipping point is approaching where people will be willing to pay for any other flight. And when enough people are walking away from the airline, then they will reach breaking point.
Turn around
The alternative is to have Jetstar Customer Care so good that a person will be telling others about how well they were looked after.
Face it, a flight is a means to an end. People don’t typically talk about the flight when discussing a holiday. Or it’s a business trip and the entire journey is a means to an end. And people know that they get what they pay for. So no meal, snack, meal, or multiple meals are just part of the expectations.
But it’s when things go wrong that people really start to care. It doesn’t matter if the flight cost $50 or $5,0000, if there is a problem then I really start to notice what the company is really like. This is the chance for a company to show that they actually do care, or if I am just another quick buck.
And when great customer care is shown, it starts to show.
The mirror
So once again, I need to hold a mirror up to our own performance.
As the last line of technical support I get the tricky problems. That makes it very challenging. Sometimes I may have a couple support problems arrive at the same time (thanks to Murphy’s Law) and this does make it tough. I need to prioritise and wade through them. The worst times are when it’s a ongoing technical problem which I have to work around and can’t actually solve. They drag on and are frustrating to both me and the customer. But I guess this is when the rubber is hitting the road.
So we will try to turn off the dripping taps, and hopefully turn all support calls into an opportunity to show customers that we actually do care.