Our national carrier is hoping the worst is finally behind it. Air New Zealand is at least flying again after the Covid pandemic put planes into mothballs and forced it to jettison thousands of staff.
But it has had a challenging year, with a shortage of planes and extreme weather events such as Cyclone Gabrielle and the Auckland floods playing havoc with flight schedules.
The company, which is 51% government-owned, had long enjoyed a reputation for quality and innovation, even if its tickets could be pricey. Now, it has a 1.2 star rating from 421 reviews on Trustpilot, one of the major online review sites. It manages just 5/10 on Airlinequality.com.
Even worse, some of its most loyal customers have turned to social media in the past year to vent about a poor-quality experience and long wait times to have issues addressed.
In June, Sir Ray Avery penned a lengthy post – his second – on LinkedIn, slamming Air New Zealand’s service. Now living in Sydney, the Kiwi inventor outlined a litany of low-level complaints – faulty entertainment screens, a 30-minute delay getting a skybridge in place for disembarking, and dinner consisting of an “angus beef pie from the supermarket and a plastic cup of unknown vegetable composition”.
Avery, who crosses the Tasman on Air New Zealand a couple of times a month, had bought a “Works Deluxe” upgrade after finding that business class was booked out. “From a customer experience perspective, Air NZ is running on fumes and Greg Foran [the airline’s chief executive] you need to step up otherwise Air NZ will become a third-rate airline,” Avery wrote on LinkedIn.
Air New Zealand head of customer services Alisha Armstrong told the Listener: “There’s no doubt that this last year has been extremely challenging. During Covid, we unfortunately let go a lot of our experts. So we’ve really had to rebuild … our customer service team.”
Armstrong joined the airline a year ago after more than a decade in customer service at Australian telecoms provider Telstra. The airline has since recruited about 600 people in customer service roles and given them 70,000 hours of training, while making changes to allow more low-level queries to be answered via its smartphone app and website.
Call centre answer times averaged 76 minutes a year ago, the average wait time to talk to a call centre agent now is 6 minutes, with 90% of calls answered within 20 minutes, says Armstrong. Which, she says, also “means that on any given day, you’ve still got 10% of customers who are getting an experience that’s much longer than that”.
Air travel can be a complex product. Cancelled flights have cascading knock-on effects for thousands of people. Issues often can’t be resolved using the app. That’s when the call centre queue multiplies.
Armstrong says the airline is improving its systems to better triage cases – for example, to get to stranded travellers. “If a customer is in a really urgent scenario … there are indicators that they are under pressure. They’ll contact us multiple times, they won’t just try one time and give up.”
But just as the company appeared to have put the worst of the disruption behind it, it ran into fresh turbulence: the worldwide problem with the Pratt & Whitney engines used on its 16 A320/321NEO planes, which could see them grounded next year.
The airline has warned of a “significant impact” on its 2024 flight schedule and Armstrong says the full extent of that impact is still being understood.
This article appeared as part of the Listener’s feature Is good customer service a thing of the past?
