A colleague of mine a few years ago took on a role of speeding up customer services at a rail franchise because their wait times were quite poor and I think the franchise rules required them to improve. He wanted to get response times down to one minute (so customers would receive responses to Tweets immediately, phone calls answered promptly, etc), which he did within a few weeks (I forgot how long, probably a couple of months). They didn't really recruit many more customer service staff, they just created a kind of triaging system where other Head Office staff or new customer service staff dealt with easy questions and experienced staff members dealt with more tricky ones. One thing he said was that when there was a large backlog, something like half of all inbound messages were customers sending messages again, sending messages with different information as they had tried to resolve their problems, trying other forms of communications, etc, etc.

I don't claim any knowledge of airline customer services (and I imagine many questions are much more complex than with a rail company), but I was impressed at how a change was enacted to improve response time. Given the resources that BA have, the length of time they've had to fix this and the amount of time they've had to recruit, I do wonder whether Sean Doyle needs to really be more honest to customers about what is happening in terms of response times (it's clearly not just short staffing, although that might be a factor) and what the aim is in terms of what BA think is a reasonable time to wait. It may be they've communicated this, but I haven't seen it.