We are the major operator at London Heathrow airport, with approximately 50 percent of flights to and from the airport featuring our distinctive red, white and blue branding. The airline is both a founding member and integral part of the successful o neworld alliance. British Airways employs 40, people, based mainly in the UK, although it also has staff based in over 75 countries around the world.
The centrepiece of the airline's long-haul fleet is the Boeing ; with 52 examples in service, British Airways is the largest operator of this type in the world. The alliance has since grown to become the third largest, after SkyTeam and Star Alliance.
On 12 November , British Airways confirmed that it had reached a preliminary agreement to merge with Iberia. On 14 July , the European Commission approved the merger under competition law, also allowing American Airlines to co-operate with the merged entity on transatlantic routes to the United States. The merger was completed on 21 January , formally creating the International Airlines Group, IAG, the world's third-largest airline in terms of annual revenue and the second largest airline group in Europe.
Jobs Jobs. Registered in England and Wales. Number British Airways, part of International Airlines Group, is one of the world's leading global premium airlines and the largest international carrier in the UK.
The carrier has its home base at London Heathrow, the world's busiest international airport, and flies to more than destinations in 70 countries.
You can find our destinations guide here. But identifying such customers is only half the battle. Learning from them so you can design and improve services that they will highly value over time is the other half. A packaged-goods business has the most incredible market data available to it.
In addition, so many human interactions are involved in producing an experience in a service business that it is often difficult to measure which interaction or series of interactions caused a customer to feel satisfied or dissatisfied. On top of that, a customer may have a bad experience because of circumstances outside our control—a flight delay caused by bad weather, for example, or problems with air-traffic control. As a result, it is often difficult to know if a complaint is the result of an isolated event—perhaps one crew just having a bad day—or a systemic problem.
By creating an organization that excels in listening to its most valuable customers. By creating data that enable you to measure the kinds of performance that create value for those customers so you can improve performance and spot and correct any weaknesses. And by recognizing that the people on the front line are the ones who ultimately create value since they are the ones who determine the kinds of experiences that the company generates for its customers.
We focus intensively on the customer, and our marketing, our operating philosophy, and our performance measures reflect that. In several key places in our organization, we have created customer advocates: in our brand-management organization; in our marketplace performance unit, which is responsible for benchmarking our operations and collecting data; and in our customer relations department. I guess the importance of brand management came home to me during my Norton Simon days, when I was responsible for Hunt-Wesson.
That experience shaped the way I perceive service products. It helped me realize that instilling a brand culture is very important in a service business because a service business is all about serving people, who have values, ideals, and feelings.
It helped me realize that we needed to see the product not simply as a seat but more comprehensively as an experience being orchestrated across the airline. That orchestration was the brand. They oversee the process of refreshing the brands and are among those responsible for thinking of ways to innovate and improve services. We started to treat our categories of service as brands in the mids.
We recognized that delivering consistent exceptional service was not enough—that service brands, like packaged-goods brands, need to be periodically refreshed to reinforce the message that the customer is receiving superior value for the money. Refreshing your service is also a way to make sure you periodically reassess how the value you think you are delivering compares with the value customers think you are delivering.
When we began, I thought the wear-out factor for a service brand was somewhere in the five-year range. Now I am pretty convinced that five years is about the maximum that you can go without refreshing the brand. How does refreshing a service brand differ from refreshing a packaged-goods brand? For consumer products, refreshing the brand may only require different labeling.
But refreshing a service brand so the customer will really recognize the change requires something major. For example, when we relaunched our Club Europe service recently, we added some of the best short-haul cuisine anywhere in the world to meet the needs of the numerous culinary cultures across Europe and added nine new airport lounges throughout Europe. In addition, we created the most ergonomic short-haul seat around, a telephone check-in service, and a valet-parking service.
We did it because we wanted to stay ahead so that we could continue to win premium customers. Refreshing a brand also might mean a complete revamp of in-flight entertainment. For example, when we refreshed our World Traveller, or economy class, brand last year, we completely overhauled the audio and video channels.
We are currently creating interactive video services for our new Boeing s. Customers will be able to complain to our customer relations department in-flight, order duty-free goods, gamble, get the latest news on business, fashion, and so forth.
It always amazes us how U. We have invested millions to research, develop, and deliver products to serve particular market segments and to build up brand equity. We need to get a healthy return on that investment so we can continue to reinvest. Conversely, upgrading people out of World Traveller would not add value to that service and would detract from our ability to focus on the needs of those customers, which are very different from the needs of those who travel Club.
If getting an upgrade is the only way a customer feels he or she can get value, then our World Traveller brand is not doing its job, and we will have long-term commodity problems like our U. They see that management is genuinely committed to delivering high-quality service. Our employees want to be proud of their product and they want to feel that they are making a difference to customers.
When competitors surpass our product, and especially when customers tell them so, our employees become upset. They are very vocal in letting management know about such situations.
They really are committed to delivering quality. They want to be part of a winning team. British Airways has a reputation for listening to customers more effectively than many other airlines. How do you listen? Of course, we do many things that lots of companies do.
Our senior managers, myself included, consciously try to talk to a lot of our passengers when we fly and move around London and the world at large. We also conduct customer forums to help us continually improve our current products and services and to help us identify services that we should consider developing over the longer term. In these forums, we ask customers to let their imagination, anger, enthusiasm, and ideas flow so we can capture their thoughts about current as well as emergent issues.
Over the years, I have seen a lot of marketing people who had been very successful in the packaged-goods business fail in the service business because, as I said, it is so difficult to get reliable data. My attitude was, If the information does not exist, create it. So in , we formed what we call our marketplace performance unit. We also are trying to learn from customers by tapping a source of information that many service companies do not exploit fully: customer complaints, suggestions, and compliments.
We have transformed customer relations from a defensive complaint department into a department of customer champions whose mission is to retain customers. See p. Both approachability and responsiveness strongly influence customer loyalty. I ardently believe that customer complaints are precious opportunities to hold on to customers who otherwise might take their business elsewhere and to learn about problems that need to be fixed.
Customers who make the effort to register a complaint are doing you a favor because they are giving you an opportunity to retain them, if you act quickly. Many service businesses suffer from a problem: the lack of comparative data to measure and benchmark operating performance.
It issues a monthly report, which goes to the chairman, the managing director, the CFO, and the top management team responsible for service and performance. Besides reporting on the key performance indicators key operating data , the report typically has a section that focuses on a particular problem or issue.
For example, it might examine a service, such as in-flight food, or it might address how British Airways is faring on a specific route, or it might evaluate the effectiveness of a particular ad campaign.
The marketplace performance unit measures the entire time it takes for a customer to get through to an agent, including the time the phone is ringing and the time the customer is on hold until he or she is transferred to an available agent.
In contrast, airlines with a management perspective might measure only how many times the phone rings before the system answers it. Waiting lines at check-in desks furnish another example. An airline with a management perspective might measure the number of minutes it took for customers to get to the front of the line. But when the marketplace performance unit asked customers, it found they were more concerned with the length of the lines and the rate at which they moved.
The marketplace performance unit also provides a critical means of measuring improvement in customer service. If a customer happens to be a peanut buff, the worse thing that can happen on a short domestic flight is for that person not to be offered a packet of peanuts. This attention to detail led British Airways to overhaul the food service on its flights between Britain and Japan.
The unit also learned that the Japanese prefer to eat small amounts of food relatively frequently and that what they really love in the middle of the night are pot noodles, a kind of noodle stew. When the unit has identified a problem, it presents its findings to senior managers, who then debate the possible solutions and create a plan of action.
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