Flying in the ointment

You have taken off and after a just few minutes in the air the “Fasten seat belt” sign dings off. At this point in a flight the world divides into three types of people – those who think “great, I can now stride confidently around the plane”, those who think “marvellous, we’re on our way” and others who think “thank god, I might yet live to crawl off this infernal flying coffin”.

I’m in the second group, with occasional and seemingly irrational nose dives into the latter. For this reason I do appreciate a few calm words from the pilot now and then. I don’t want a running commentary telling us how much fuel is left or how responsive the new fly-by-wire system is, just a measured sentence or two every so often just to confirm that all is still well.

I think pilot communication is something that budget airline Go does particularly well. However, on my most recent flight with it, this policy was given a thorough testing. The plane was coming in to land at Stansted; the undercarriage was down and we were almost low enough to read the labels of the knickers flapping in the breeze on the clothes lines below.

Then we started to gain height again, the wheels rumbled back into the foetal position and we spent 15 long minutes circling round a dull looking town. There was no word from the cockpit so, because the pilot had been talking a lot before, you didn’t have to be Biggles to work out that something was wrong. Finally, he told us, with refreshing frankness, that the flaps on the wings were stuck and we would have to land with them as they were. This would involve (in his words) “coming in quite a lot faster than you will be used to, landing with a bit of a bump and braking fairly hard. But don’t worry, the runway at Stansted is long enough to cope.”

When we hit the ground the aeroplane turned over and burst into a huge ball of flames… No, not really, I just wrote that to make sure you were still paying attention. In fact, it was pleasantly brisk and fairly smooth compared to an average landing. The result of it was that, despite the technical problem, everybody who stepped off that plane felt that they had been kept well informed and so, by extension, looked after.

Up until that point I had formed very few opinions about Go, which isn’t surprising as I’d booked on the Web, check-in took less than a minute and I spoke to the stewardess once. I sort of liked the airline’s advertising and the in-flight magazine, but I didn’t really warm to the company until I had experienced real human communication.

I can’t help feeling that personality and human values have become casualties in the battle to cut short- haul flight costs. Both EasyJet and Go are proving that people prefer a pared-down service and lower fares, but one of the key challenges for them and their competitors is to infuse the service they provide with more warmth. Just because people are prepared to exchange trimmings like free meals for lower prices doesn’t mean that they’re happy to be treated like human cargo.

The budget airlines’ challenge – to cut unnecessary service while creating a bond with customers – is also faced by on-line product retailers. Part of their difficulty is that the public is increasingly, and rightly, suspicious of claims that new technology has been introduced to benefit them.

The truth is that most companies are simply investing in technology to make their processes cost less to run, which is fine as long as it isn’t dressed up as a benefit when it’s not.

And this is not just about the Web. Automatic recorded-voice switchboards are the ultimate example of a “to enable us to serve you better” cheat. They have never helped me receive any better service. In fact, I find them rather infuriating, time-consuming and repulsively inhuman. The next time that I have a conversation with someone from Cellnet, for example, I will start every sentence with “You know that you have four options”.

I think that this cut-price, technology-led, customer “service” culture presents some of the greatest opportunities yet to prove that branding is not just about logos and packaging. There is a clear role for designers to keep bringing clients back to key questions, like “Does this technology application or new way of handling people really (truly) benefit the customer and will they continue coming back to us because of it?”

Frankly, before we got in a flap over Essex, I could happily have plumped for another budget airline instead of Go. Now maybe not. But, with so much thought going into customer service issues, it shouldn’t take an extraordinary situation to make me have an opinion.