Questionnaires and Appraisal
I always understood that, at least for WW, the questionnaires were handed out by the CSD to the passengers in seats that were pre-determined, and therefore the CSD was not able to influence the results by choosing the passengers who said “please”, and “thank you”, and “that was excellent”.
My experience in a career where we always were seeking good, and honest, customer feed back is that it is extremely hard to achieve. Ask folk at the time and they often are (understandably), ‘over influenced’ by the event that has just happened to them. So an excellent cabin service, and then the item they wanted is not available on the duty free cart, and they damn their whole experience. Ask them a few days later (perhaps by eMail), and they either don’t reply, or produce a bland response that is not terribly helpful. Many customer service questionnaire are banal in the extreme. I shocked some poor young lady the other week, who had called me on behalf of a motor manufacturer to ask about my experience at one of their franchised dealers, by commenting that their telephone questionnaire was clearly designed solely to give some senior suit in marketing a nice warm feeling, and they could achieve that just by p**ing into their Wellingtons.
Using customer feedback to rank customer facing staff needs considerable care, and I hope that BA is organised to do this fairly. One Lady’s “Good” is another Lady’s “Excellent”. I was forcibly reminded of this many years ago when a Senior Royal Navy Officer commented on my over-use of the adjective ‘Good’ in a staff paper that I had written at his invitation. I had failed to understand that, in the RN, the Friday before Easter Day is ‘Satisfactory’ Friday. And I also had the experience of arriving to run a Company where the Management Team had ranked every one of their staff ‘Very Good’ or ‘Excellent’, and wanted bonuses to suit. It took a long time to get across the message that in any group of people, there must be some sort of normal distribution of attributes; and whist our people’s performance overall might be streets ahead of the competition, within our population, there must be a continuum of performance from “Excellent” down to “Poor”.
Getting fair performance assessments, and getting managers to rank people fairly, to manage poor performers to improve, or, if they can’t, to seek alternative opportunities, is hard; but it’s not impossible. I hope that the systems put in place that will determine cabin crew bonuses are transparent and clearly understood by the cabin crew and their appraisers.