Thursday, April 10, 2008

Delta Airline and Customer Relationship Management

I went to New York last week end to visit my girlfriend's family and to attend the Sweet Sixteen party of her cousin. I wanted to give you the feedback on my experience with my flight.
The company was Delta Airline.

Food during the flight.
I already knew that airlines companies don't include meals in the fare for inside-US trips any longer. I still find that kind of rude for two reasons:
  • A San Francisco New York trip last around 6h30, which is roughly the time of a New York Paris flight. This is a long time, and therefore, it should be consider as an international flight. At least for coast to coast trips (Miami-Los Angeles, or Philadelphia-Seattle for example)
  • This service has become a standard over the years. It is the same thing for the 30 minutes Pizza delivery. This would not make sens a pizza restaurant would serve you in more than 30 minutes. This is a regression of the level of service provided by airline companies.

Anyways, I understand gas prices impacted a lot the benefits of airlines, and paying $8 for a meal is not that bad, especially that the menu seemed very nice.
The problem that occurred, is that I wanted to have a chicken sandwich and my girlfriend a chicken salad. While the flight attendant asked for what we wanted to order, we learned that they had neither of what we wanted, they were already sold-out. I find that very rude. Especially because we were not the last row of the plane (there was probably about 20 to 30 persons behind us). The airline must be able to provide food to all the customers, not the ones from the front seat.

Customer survey
There was also, available on the passangers' screens a survey, to get customer's feedback on their trip. I thought: "Great, this is a good idea as the customer has 1 the time to complete the survey and 2 they have at the top of their mind their opinion about the flight". Then I started completing the questionnaire. But I have been kind of deceived: nothing was concerning the service. The questions were about how clean the plain was (don't get me wrong, which is also important). How clean was the seat? How clean was the table? etc. But an airline's company added value (especially these days that price competition is so high) is the service. If companies such as Air France or Singapoure Airline have succeeded so well, it is by delivering a top of the line service.

So my recommandation would be to
  • To have enough stocks to provide the whole airplane with the menu.
  • keep this good idea, but to use it to evaluate the service on board.
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