snaxmuppet

I don't think that the FA should accept being abused but at the same time I do think they should behave in a professional manner and be trained sufficiently to be able to cope with difficult or abusing passengers in a professional way. Yes they are human and so will have bad days, as do we all, but in general I would say that the behaviour described by the OP was unacceptable and if it were me I would be complaining to BA in the strongest possible way... passengers have paid for a service and should expect to get it... strike or no strike.

mikesyr18

Doesn't apply to any other job, sorry, but you're wrong.

Not to sound rude to you, but that's not how the real world works, the employee needs to suck it up.

AlwaysOnTheRoad

FYI. Customer relations response.

Dear XXX,

Thanks for letting us know what happened when you travelled in our First cabin to Cape Town, on 02 July 2017. I apologise for the delay in contacting you. You’re clearly disappointed with the service you received on board your flight and I can understand why. From what you've told me I absolutely agree we let you down and please accept our sincere apologies.

Our staff are highly trained and we’re really proud of the service we offer, so I’m sorry to hear a member of our crew wasn't behaving as professionally as we expect them to be. I've passed details of your complaint to the line manager of the Customer Service Manager on duty that day for their investigation. As your complaint involves a member of staff, Customer Relations won’t receive any details about the result of your comments as this would be a breach of the Data Protection Act within the UK. However, please be assured your complaint has been taken very seriously by our Management team and will be handled internally. However, I realise this doesn’t change the impact this had on your journey. It’s only through your comments we’re able to focus on areas where we need to improve and we appreciate you bringing this to our attention.

Thanks again for getting in touch with us. We value your support as a Gold Guest List member.




Best regards

Dave_C

AKA, filed to the deleted items.

Thomathy

I think JNB is much the same. I have not flown very many F legs, but those I have, have all been LHR-JNB or back until recently (perhaps around ten legs in total on that route.) I thought the service very poor indeed - oddly much worse than Club. Often I had the distinct feeling that the F service style was less 'structured', and being provided by crew without sufficient experience or knowledge to deliver good service without such a structure.

I was recently astonished when flying BA F from LHR and back to the east coast at the comparatively high quality of the F service. The staff were friendly and polite, there were amenity bags and menus provided rather than either forgotten or having run out, and I felt the staff knew what they were doing and were able to provide a good, personalised service appropriate to each customer - more formal for some, less for others. The service style suddenly made a lot more sense with a more competent (and confident) seeming crew and I really enjoyed the F experience for the first time, rather than experiencing it as a mysteriously disorganised version of Club World.

I have subsequently wondered if the Mixed Fleet element is partly responsible for this. I don't know why it should be, though. Johannesburg is an extremely profitable route and runs two A380s a day, directly between two BA hubs. If one set of crew really were worse, why would BA place them on this particular route?

Hard to say what is just lack of the draw with the individual flight and what is a pattern, but currently finding it difficult to reconcile the consistently poor JNB service with my single east coast experience.

Orange.Man

I think you'll find nowadays, if you're rude to staff it's exactly how the real world works.

Given your logic, the guy who filmed himself berating the ryanair check in assistant was absolutely in the right. The agent should've just manned up and accepted it.

simons1

Ultimately I agree the customer is always right, and to some extent you do have to suck it up, but I don't think it hurts to treat others as you would like to be treated.

If in our business someone rolls their eyes at me, of course I respond to the customer with respect and politeness whilst ensuring their proposal gets buried underneath anything else I have on. So ultimately no-one wins really.

Calchas

It's a bit sharp isn't it? My company has "fired" customers before who we thought were more trouble than they were worth.

But we are a very small company that probably cannot afford to have unhappy staff.

enviroian

Wow. I hope you you write BA make sure you tell them the flight attendants name and ensure this moron gets fired.

LordBuckethead

That's unfair. What reason do you have to doubt that the message was passed on? It will have been, and the manager concerned should have a conversation to determine what happened. Good management practice will be determine the next steps only after this has taken place, as it could be anywhere from a formal disciplinary process to a simple 'please think before you retaliate'. We've only heard one side too, remember, and there could equally be more to the story than we know.

What is unreasonable is to expect staff HR records to be passed back to CR so they can write back to a customer explaining 'yeah, we shot him at dawn'. UK law thankfully prevents this.

Ber2dca

Employees need to suck it up when people are 'rude' and unpleasant (like say they speak loudly, interrupt you and make absurd demands) but they don't have to accept verbal abuse (like they call you names, threaten you etc.). That's the line usually drawn.

But to the point, eye-rolling is obviously not crossing the line and still very much within the limits of conduct a customer-facing employee should tolerate while maintaining composure and politeness.

In realistic terms though, employees will almost always go from 'try to do right by the customer' mode to 'perform the bare minimum of what is required' mode if the customer is seen as rude. Now there are unfortunately employees for whom the latter is the default mode anyway and they may then also disregard procedure and start arguing with customers.

muishkin

Now reading OP's description of the story, it seems like BA had a reduced F crew so they couldn't serve two sides simultaneously. The F crew picked one side to serve first, and the OP was unhappy about that and decided to complain. Given OP's history of complaining about rather trivial crap (including this incident), I am fully in the camp of the people who think there is more to this story than OP is letting on. As we all know, complaining can range from a polite discussion to a steady stream of invective.

Again I found it unbelievable that the OP is whining about waiting for 20+ more minutes before getting service. For me that's being a drama queen.

NWIFlyer

Nine posts discussing the entirely irrelevant and off topic subject of US & European employment law, which frankly also degenerated into nationalistic mud slinging, have been removed.

Please stick to the core concern raised by the OP, and at all times remember we treat each other with respect here and debate the issue, not the person.

NWIFlyer
Moderator - BA forum

binman

Because that is a standard BA letter responding to a passenger complaint and one probably written by a machine. It been doing the rounds for years though admittedly the software has got better and it does now vary letters a little.

Moreover given the the current labour issue I doubt there is a cabin crew manager today who would actually deal with this issue which will simply be put down to "the passengers word against the crew member."

Finally, given the letter and its variants have been doing the rounds for a last 10 years, and probably closer to 15,if there was a shred of truth in it then BA would be the most wonderful passenger focused carrier in the air. They are not because they don't act on passenger feedback of this kind.

Dambus

Wonder if Putin ever flies BA?

http://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-40536916/angela-merkel-rolls-her-eyes-at-vladimir-putin

There was a thread here many years ago about specific customer service training for FIRST/Concorde FAs. IIRC it included examples of how to navigate prickly situations where the customer is clearly wrong / unreasonable without leading to a confrontation.

Not suggesting the OP is in that category but wonder if that sort of training is still part of the model?