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11. People and Internal marketing
11.1 People
As already seen in chapter 6 customer care has a key role in airline marketing.
Customers are becoming increasingly sophisticated in terms of their expectations
putting more and more pressure on the airlines. The human element forms an intrinsic
part of the service package as it is a high contact service. Therefore customer care must
be everyone’s concern throughout the organisation. For this reason management of
people is a key task and must be strategically planned for. Staff communication,
selection and training are high priorities. Human resource management in the airline
industry has to start to consider the implications of globalisation in terms of multi-ethnic
staff to better deliver the service to a number of passengers who increasingly speak
languages other than English and thinks differently. The integration of different cultures
could be the next challenge for the airlines.
11.2 Internal marketing
Internal marketing is a means of involving staff at all levels in effective marketing
programmes by enabling them to understand their role within the marketing process.
Internal marketing programmes consist of training and staff development, effective
internal communications and integration schemes, designed to enhance knowledge and
understanding of the overall marketing orientation within the organisation. Internal
marketing gives employees the status of internal customers with the same importance or
more (Virgin Atlantic hierarchy of publics) of the external customers. Customer
satisfaction being achieved through employee satisfaction. Internal marketing should
aim at ensure commitment, motivate, transmit values. Internal marketing as been key to
British Airways to go through its management of change, corporate image building and
increase overall co-operation within the organisation.
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11.3 Training and development
Training is constantly needed during employment to impart knowledge, to give focus
and direction to employees and to update competencies. Training can also be a good
selling point for future and present employees as they are attracted and retained by the
quality of the training provided. In addition as key elements of any human resource
management programme an appraisal system consistent with the values transmitted
should be set up to evaluate and develop the airline’s most important asset, its
employees and an incentive scheme should be set up. British Airways has a system of
share options for directors and senior managers which will be probably replaced soon
with a long term incentive scheme to encourage high performance and attracting and
retaining managerial talent. At the moment BA rewards its managers depending on what
they achieve and how they do it (how they manage people) which includes upward
appraisal. Virgin Atlantic relies on profit sharing at the end of each profitable year or
exceptionally on unplanned entries (British Airways compensation in relation to the
Dirty Trick campaign), teams generally prevail on individuals.
British Airways has been awarded as the third best employer in the UK after M&S and
BTR by the annual British Quality of Management award. British Airways and Virgin
Atlantic have extensive training programmes involving all the different disciplines
needed to make a successful airline fly. Both airlines have an induction programme for
new recruits with the task to introduce them to the culture and the reality of the day-today management. The training provided of course strongly reflects the shared values of
the company and try to build a service culture where everybody has to please everybody
else.
Most training is directed at empowerment. Staff are given guidelines and
encouragement o solve passengers problem, managers are thought how to delegate. The
only way to make staff trustworthy is to trust them giving them responsibility and
authority. It is a manager job to motivate the staff and create the right atmosphere for
their development.
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The scope is to bring employees’ personality to work and put it into their job. Staff must
be able to think outside rigid frameworks and do what is right for the passengers
anticipating their needs.
BA have gone through major changes in training, from its training sessions during the
privatisation, to the follow up which meant to add that little bit which could bring the
airline to become a fully customer oriented one. Several programmes with attractive
names have been developed in time to train and develop staff capabilities, such as
“Managing Winners”, “Winning for customers”, “Putting People First”, “Customer
First”, “A day in the life”, “Gold in the hold”, “Money matters”, “The magic of flight”,
“Engineering excellence”, “We fly to serve” etc. These include sessions on
assertiveness, language, Transactional Analysis, coping with stress, giving and receiving
strokes, team building, peer support and more technical issues.
BA has always been training people formulating every last detail. Little has been left to
the mood of the crew on the day, not even the flexible attitude to accommodate the
passengers’ wishes, which ironically, has itself being programmed down to the last “no
problem”. Recently it has changed calling for more personalised, less standardised
attitudes towards the customers.
Virgin Atlantic new staff have a 2 day off-the-job induction programme within their
first 2 months of employment and customer service has the star billing. All the in-house
management and supervisory programmes include a module on customer service to
ensure the company “leads by example”. Behaviour breeds behaviour is the key concept
on which training is built.
Follow up training is built on Virgin previous accidents or complaints (learn from
mistakes). Virgin addresses its employees with recurrent problems, urge them to find
solutions and witnesses the effects in the statistics on areas of complaints. This sessions
are workshops, discussions, “role plays”, “what happened next” scenarios and case
studies. Employees attend a workshop every 6-8 months.
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11.4 Internal Communications
Internal communications can assume different forms, but its main aim is to reinforce the
quality of the service provided. Internal communication is often embedded in a normal
advertising campaign run for external customers but aiming at the employees too to
demonstrate how important they are to the final outcome. During the turnaround British
Airways started to communicate that a major change was about to come, than that it was
happening, and later on it illustrated the benefit obtained. This communication
campaign was fundamental to gain the involvement and the commitment of staff and
rely on their support to really change the company (bonding).
Media for internal communications are face to face interactions, open doors and
management by walking around, internal magazines, internal broadcasting, training,
posters campaigns inside the airline premises, external campaign having employees as
customers too etc.
At the end of 1995 British Airways has launched a campaign for its internal customers
called “The World Favours the Brave” aimed at making staff take the initiative and act
when they have to rather than wait for direction. The campaign has been seen in the
airline’s newspaper BA News. The first ad feature M.L. King and the slogan “If he
hadn’t had a dream no one would have listened” relies on posters featuring heroes such
as Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King to motivate staff. Another features N. Mandela
with a speech bubble saying “I’m going to be president” plus the slogan “Have the
courage of your convictions”. Another ad features President Clinton with Yasser Arafat
and Yitzak Rabin at the signing of the Palestinian/Israeli peace accord, while another
shows Sherpa Tensing, of Everest fame, being told by a less determined fellow
mountaineer “It’s no good, Tensing, my socks are all wet”. The campaign is part of
BA’s Leadership 2000 scheme which aims to make BA the UK’s best managed
company within five years.
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Now BA is about to launch the world’s first corporate television channel. It plans to
broadcast a daily 15 minute news and current affairs programme to all 55,000 staff
around the world.
The bulletin will be independently produced and consist of world
news, aviation news and company updates. It will be available in every BA office and
piped into BA partner hotels.
At Virgin Atlantic the Customer Relations Department produces monthly reports for the
Board, summarised as the Top Ten Complaints and Compliments, these are then passed
on to staff to extend customer service awareness to all employees. Cross-functional
teams help conveying the information from one department to another resulting in
useful and innovative cross-fertilisation. Richard Branson organises several parties
every year for his employees creating unique opportunities for face-to face interactions.
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