You take it too literally.
The art of customer service is giving the customer the feeling that he is always right, even when he is wrong and trying to solve problems without arguing.
When I use Asian carriers I feel they are always doing their best to accommodate all my needs, no "I can't be bothered" attitude and if there is a request they can't fulfil, they are very apologetic about it, no "can't be done, get over it" attitude some QF staff have.
QF has a very tough competition with the Asian carriers and if it can't match them on price, then AJ should at least put an effort in training his staff to match them on customer service.
You are missing the point. Off course the customer isn't always right. It's all about dealing with customers (some of them unreasonable) in a way that is not confronting and trying as hard as possible to solve the problem and keep them loyal to your business.
There are too many complaints about QF customer service and it doesn't matter if they are right or wrong, the management must make some changes to stay competitive in the market.
This will go O/T but anyway...
I believe this is a very outdated phrase - it needs to be reinterpreted because now it is used and misinterpreted far more maliciously than its original intent (in spite noble).
Just as much as you believe people have mistaken the "literal" interpretation of this phrase, there are just as many - if not more - people (naturally those who don't work in customer service but are customers themselves anyway) who take the literal interpretation of this phrase for the
customer side. The availability of imperative and public feedback methods popularised by social media juxtapose these kinds of cases. The result of this misinterpretation by customers is something which
mannej has somewhat alluded to - a plethora of people who are unreasonable and use this phrase as a cover-all trump card to seemingly exemplify the utter lack of "customer service" or rather diplomacy on the part of the airline (or any company), when in fact it is the customer who is being undiplomatic (unwilling to negotiate) or unreasonable (attempting unfair moral or tactical gain from baseless or malicious intent).
You might say we can't "save these customers" - that's not how the public see it. It is interesting to see news outlets or "communication experts" or "social media experts" (whom I'm sure, again, at a
per se level, are good at what they do) pick up the unreasonable cases and expose them as examples of a customer who has been badly wronged by the company. They have automatically assumed that the customer did nothing wrong, the customer is very reasonable and the customer is diplomatic. Some customers are,
but more than a trivial amount are not (at the very least, initially). Again, due to social media, it is much easier these days for people to be judge, jury and executioner, which - as much as one may want to be believed that many companies are large, faceless and in general "bad guys" - is unfair on the company; they may have resolve eventually with the customer, but the paint has been splashed and the stain will never wash out.
Having worked in customer service before, whilst it does take training to do such positions, those who are good or at least trying are not trying to be undiplomatic (the first and foremost quality required - diplomacy) or unreasonable. But there are certainly customers who are trying to gain unfair advantage (in some cases they have deliberately "set up" the situation from the initial transaction to attempt to "game" the system, and would you believe the absolute outrage when we subtly call them out on their game).
To be diplomatic and to work towards a mutually agreeable outcome - although filled with buzzwords and jargo-vocabulary - is really the heart of the matter. To assume every customer is always right is no longer a reasonable epithet, is a dangerous precedent and there are clearly examples where customers are now using it to press their advantage.
I should finally qualify that of course this doesn't mean the disposition that all customers are unreasonable, or that all customers are unreasonable per se, is the correct attitude to adopt. Nor are all cases of customer service (including failures and recoveries) borne from the problem I describe above. We unfortunately don't celebrate customer service wins as much as we should (we report more on the paint splashing much more than it being cleaned up) - in fact, only the company reports on wins which are usually later decried by the general public as spin - not to mention that we often rate a company more on their failures rather than on their successes (which admittedly highly mirrors our behaviour as humans amongst other humans), but as much as you believe the literal misinterpretation is not a case to argue against the former "golden rule", I submit that there are far more than a trivial number of cases where this rule has done it's day, and if it's any service to the rule's noble beginnings, then it's quite the opposite - the rule is being destroyed.
EXACTLY and of course a CEO is not a popularity contest.
Popularity contest it may not be, but popularity is an inherent component of the diplomatic process of which - like politics - largely mirrors the method in which company management is composed, including the role of the CEO. The main difference versus the predominant western political system is the proportional distortion due to shareholding numbers which has a larger influence on displacing where the key interest of who really should decide the CEO (as it would seem), let alone the internal power of the board independent of the shareholders.
Now if that last statement is false then there's not much reason why Joyce should still be the CEO (in fact, he would've likely been dismissed some years ago). But from observing the current situation, we know this is not the case, or there is something else we do not know which is critical to understand (or, it is an unfortunate side-effect of the legislation and framework in which Australian companies may operate).
