Since January, I have been using Firefly to go to Singapore almost on a weekly basis. The choice is a no-brainer.
My apartment at Saujana Resort is only 10 minutes’ drive from Subang Airport, where Firefly is based. The distance from the baggage search point to Immigration and to the plane is, maybe, two hundred metres. When you arrive in Singapore’s Seletar Airport, you can be in a taxi heading to the city in ten minutes.
Subang Airport also has a lounge where holders of certain bank cards or MH’s Enrich cards can also use before their flights. It offers good nasi-lemak and good coffee. Unfortunately, there are no lounge facilities at the Seletar end; the food and drinks at its only café are also only so-so.
Firefly uses turboprop ATR aircraft for its services. The seats are pretty narrow, and cooler air can only be felt after the aircraft has ascended to a certain altitude. It serves a bottle of water and a small packet of peanuts and a packet of Famous Amos cookies. The ride can be rough at times since these low-flying aircraft are vulnerable to poor weather conditions. I suppose the pilots are all trained and certified and I usually took the turbulence well.
The fares are not cheap, though. I have to pay between RM750 and RM1,200 for each set of return tickets. Firefly certainly knows how to make suckers out of travelers like me.
A couple of recent incidents have prompted me to pen this blog to share my unhappiness with friends about this airline.
On Thursday, June 20, I presented myself at Firefly’s check-in counter for my FY3131 Seletar to Subang. I was in Singapore for a day trip and as such only carried a small document bag. The young officer at the counter must be averse to a bald old man with a walking cane. She directed that I have my bag weighed! I thought it was ridiculous; I have never been asked to do so in my entire flying experience and naturally expressed my displeasure. The whole bag was maybe a kilo or so in weight. She mumbled something quite irritatingly. I did comply but I also lodged a complaint against her to the officers at the service desk nearby. I just wanted them to tell the young lady to be more courteous or thoughtful to older folks like me and more consistent with they way they talk about SOPs. The officers appeared nonchalant. I served notice that I would make a formal written complaint. (Incidentally, I believed I paid for the highest tier of tickets for the trip.)
If it was an SOP, then I would certainly comply. However, I saw that none of the subsequent passengers were asked to weigh their backpacks, some of which looked quite heavy. I took some pictures of them.
I lost no time in lodging a complaint through Firefly’s website.
What I received was on June 24 most ridiculous. I was
addressed as Madam TEH Saw Hwa! That is my wife’s name! I was the passenger. And I clearly spelled
out my name in Firefly’s electronic form where I also furnished my Enrich
details – address, telephone number, etc! It was signed off by a certain Siti
Nur Syazana of Firefly Customer Relations. There was no way I could reply to correct
her.
Another reply came on June 29. Sorry we are still investigating! Again, I was addressed as Mrs TEH Saw Hwa, and the email was signed by a certain Fatin Nurain of Malaysia Airlines’ Customer Relations.
Yet another reply came on July 4, again signed by Fatin Nurain. Similar message: Working towards a full resolution, blah, blah, blah. Again, I was addressed as Mrs TEH Saw Hwa.
Its “full” resolution came on July 12, again addressed to Mrs TEH Saw Hwa, and signed by the same Fatin Nurain and copied to a certain Manninder Singh Manmohan Singh.
This time I blew my top and wrote to blast them.
She was telling me that her colleague in the check-in counter was following SOP! I replied that she was talking rubbish!
In the first place, the complainant was ME and not my wife. How could their record get it so wrong? And I also sent her pictures to show that the other passengers were not asked to follow SOP. SOP had to be applied consistently!
I have not received any response from her or her colleague since then.
There might be a bigger can of worms in Firefly’s way of keeping records.
In a separate incident in April, only on reaching Seletar was I told that my Firefly flight had been cancelled and I had to go to Changi Airport to catch a Malaysian Airline flight back. I was entitled to reimbursements for out-of-pocket expenses incurred as a result. I wrote in to submit my claim. And believe me, I was addressed as Mrs TEH Saw Hwa by the same Siti Nur Syazana. Somehow, I managed to speak to her, and she confirmed that the mistake had been corrected.
Two months later, I still got to be addressed as Mrs TEH Saw Hwa!
Firefly would ask passengers to respond to their survey after each flight. For months, its response button for this purpose was not working. I suppose no one in Firefly was monitoring it. I told their officers at both the Seletar and Subang ends about this, but no one seemed to care. (I see that it has finally been fixed. Why it took so long?)
* * * * *
If Malaysia Airline owns Firefly, one is surprised how such things can still happen. After all, the airline was formerly called Malaysia Airline System (MAS). It seems the word 'system' has been dropped not without precautionary reason. Maybe it was on the recommendation of the various consultants who went in and came out crestfallen.
ReplyDeleteYes, any customer-contact between a large corporation and the public masses must be predicated on human and humane metrics. The deployment of standard operating procedure (SOP) is just some protocol that tries to sweep everything under a few rules made by bureaucrats sitting in aircond rooms who take it as a chore, like writing some service charter proudly displayed along hallways but soon forgotten after the bonuses have been spent.
Whether by counter or webpage, the customer-contact is about the faceless corporation talking to the customer to extract responses on what is the problem. Since management is about solving problems, any complaint not resolved shows poor management.
Bezos faced this once. Amazon customers complained they could not get through the line. So, in one of his board-room meetings, he picked up the phone and dialled his own customer-care line, and indeed found it so.
Nowadays, one is put through a menu. 1 for this, 2 for that. Often you can't hear the menu correctly because the announcer can't be bothered to speak clearly. And if it is a telecom issue, how do you call in to say you can't get your internet to reboot? Often, it is their server instead which needs to reboot.
Read these lips - many of them basically don't care. It is as if they got an emotional baggage from somewhere which they bring into the office and that's because their management don't instruct them on pains of retribution on the importance of seeing things from the viewpoint of the customer first. One believes that's the essence of the customer-first mantra. Which is important to reduce churn or customer running to others.
However, in the case of Firefly, it knows it has a monopoly on flights from/to Subang. But that shouldn't excuse its staff from doing the wrong thing. Which is to aggravate for no good reason any customer, especially those who are distinguished and repeat customers.
In this particular case, it seems management didn't step up. It should have proactively told off its staff right from the start for being ambiguous and arbitrary when using SOP as an excuse, what more not updating its 'system' on customer names. What's so difficult about making a few corrective keystrokes on the computer to update the customer database? That's certainly easier and faster than walking to the loo or cafeteria.
And does it still expect customers to change their gender in order to receive an appropriate response? It is a costly exercise without assured operational success!
These days customers are of superior and perspicacious intelligence. As PhuaCK has oft said, "don't pray pray".
The economy of this country is made of three parts: one, manufacturing and that's not very value-added owing to lack of skilled manpower; two, agriculture and that's not very stable owing to lack of good foreign workers; and three, services which requires service providers at every and all levels to see things from the perspective of their customers so as to finetune their services in order to remain relevant in a dynamically changing daily routine.
No SOP can account for any and all changes because the premise of an SOP in the first place is to boil every possible interaction down to a few standards written by bored bureaucrats eons ago.
Companies should review their SOPs regularly, something one suspects has never been done enough together with board meetings to understudy what can next go wrong. Like maintenance records of propeller planes.
Companies should have a heritage of excellent customer service inasmuch relevant and desired product portfolio and a backroom continuous improvement mechanism backed by sharp research and analytical activities. There, typed without a thought.