FRESH FROM LANDING the sixth spot on Fortune’s Ten Best Airlines In The World list, Virgin Atlantic Airways is ready to take its customer service to a higher level in Barbados and the Caribbean.
Andre Bello, the British carrier’s commercial manager for the Caribbean, said he was “very happy” about this latest recognition, which came at a time when Virgin was seeing increased business here.
“I am very happy to be recognised by an international body, especially when the feedback comes from actual customers. When you look at us as an airline, that really has been our differentiation point over the years,” he said.
“For us in Barbados what we are more focussed on is that total customer experience where we really look at what’s happening in the air – we feel we have always been one of the leaders in service – and add that to what do on the ground.”
He noted that Virgin’s Hastings, Christ Church office was a location where “we invite every single customer who comes through these doors to actually give us feedback on our service”.
“In the last couple of months about 60 per cent of them have given us feedback and our real objective here is to respond immediately to any problems we encounter and to look for ways we could continuously improve what we have been doing here,” Bello explained.
“Our customer feedback scores have been extremely high, they have been above industry standard, and we are happy to provide that total service so that the entire interaction with Virgin Atlantic is one that is really positive.”
The Virgin group is so serious about service that it plans to invest more than 300 million pounds company-wide “in improving the service . . . between now and 2018”.
Staff, he added, “have gone through extensive training over the last two [to] three years to really deliver that personalised service so that everyone in our aircraft feels that extra Virgin touch”.
“We try to deliver the basic service . . . you expect on an airline but then we add that Virgin layer on top of it and that’s very important for us as a brand, as a company that really connects with customers and tries to personalise the experience for each person, whether you are in upper class, or whether you are in economy.”
In terms of business in the Caribbean, Bello said this month and the last were traditionally busy ones for Virgin here and that 2015 was no different in this regard.
“As a year on the whole . . . we have seen some increases. It fluctuates through the year and we know that this is the busy time so we are going to look back at the end of the season and see what the numbers are like, but it looks very positive in terms of forward bookings,” he said. (SC)
