As soon as AJ goes, the better it will be. Along with his senior exec team, they are toxic people.
So, this is not a response to
@TheInsider as such, nor the response of a QF ‘plant’, but the above comment raises some questions for me.
The primary one being, why do you think anyone else, in the same position, would do any different? What I’ve not seen discussed here, or any of the other sort of ‘QF is bad’ threads is a broader or more wholistic view.
Let me also note that this is pure speculation, I know nothing more than the average punter (whomever that is…).
So, what if QF provides customer services the way it currently does, because that’s all it can do right now? I don’t for a minute think any CEO, nor exec team, sets out to piss people off. The opposite is true, they all want to win awards for being worlds best, so why would they take decisions that create angst? Why would they enact policies that annoy people; that antagonise their workforce; that limit the upside for their companies? I believe the simple answer is because they have to. In QF’s case, because there may not be any other better alternatives that keep the company going.
You may have read some of the quite ‘conspiratorial’ posts by
@RAM over the past few years, and whilst I have no facts to support or ignore the issues that AFFer has raised, it does seem logical that QF is sailing very close to financial armageddon and simply doesn’t have the cash to provide world leading, or even what we would likely consider acceptable (for QF) customer service. More broadly, there have been cuts in almost every part of the QF organisation, sales and lease backs, mortgages on airframes etc. We also know that QF have long been ‘imaginative’ with their financials (various JQ accounting practices?) to make everything tell the PR story they want told.
So why? No exec would want to do that, even if it did increase shareholder return, because then they destroy their brand. Instead, I’m sure they’re all trying to tread a very fine line between surviving and maximising profits and they’re doing it in an industry that has always been problematic.
Consider BA, they have done many things similar to QF and anyone reading BA fora on Flyertalk would recognise much of the same disappointment as seen on negative QF threads here. A proper case study would like find the more frequent flyers of all legacy, or full service airlines, expressing disappointment at how things have changed for the worse over the past 5, 10, or even 20 years. I’m sure the various heads of BA, AA, LH, UA, NZ etc, have all released mission statements aiming for ‘worlds best’, but then begun the process of the death of a thousand cuts in order to save a little money here, a little more money there. Call it ‘enhancements’ if you want, but from a customer pov it all slowly adds up to less customer service over different airline areas.
I suggest that this is purely logical behaviour from senior company staff who are battling to keep their organisations afloat, in a marketplace where FR, U2, WN, and all of the various AirAsia brands, and all of the hundreds of other LCCs and ULCCs are slowly but surely taking revenue from the ‘legacy’ companies, but more so, are changing the expectations of the marketplace. An airline ticket costs $45 and for that you get a seat from A to B and that’s it…
I don’t endorse 3, 4, or 5 hour waits for customer service, but I do sort of understand why decisions may have been taken to use cheaper labour. Or why every new round of wage bargaining might have a company trying to squeeze their workforce to reduce costs. Or why JetConnect was developed, or why Alliance, Network, Cobham and other sub-units?, sub-brands?, whatever they are called, are used to try and lower costs to compete with LCCs.
However, I definitely don’t subscribe to the overly simplistic view that Alan Joyce is an idiot and he and his exec team are out to screw everyone over. Rather, I’d suggest they are acting entirely rationally in their capitalist market and are probably trying to take what they consider the best decisions to keep their company going. I make no comment on whether a different CEO worth $1m a year could or would have done any better… that’s a debate for a different thread (does so called exec level ‘talent’ actually make a measurable difference to company performance? Or, is any exec worth $20m a year? - discuss).
Anyway, in conclusion, (thanks to the one person still reading at this point…) will QFs current customer service woes affect my spend with the company, probably not, because I’ve long been what I consider a value AFFer and never really stuck with QF if I didn’t have to. I’ve chosen my spend on a number of factors and will continue to do so, even if QFs perceived offering continues along the race for the bottom. I sort of understand why they’re doing what they are, in the same way you can sort of understand why the US big-3 airlines are the way they are, or why different airport security emphasises different things (and maddens us so). Unfortunately for all of us in Australia, QF is the big player so we can’t always vote with our feet/wallets and the ‘problem’ will remain.
Final point (I promise). It will be interesting to see how QF reacts, having potentially trashed its reputation more broadly than it may have expected with things such as making savings in customer support. Will it end up costing more to win back customers, than it saved using Mindpearl employees, rather than longer term QF salaried individuals for front line customer support? (ask Boeing whether prioritising saving money rather than prioritising engineering excellence has worked out well for them) As always, hindsight will be revealing, but what it always reveals is that things happen for a reason when you try to look at the bigger picture.
