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All smiles for Dragon Air |
“Will we ever fly Dragon Air again”? I asked myself. “A resounding Yes”, I told myself many times, “whenever we have the slightest opportunity and perhaps, forever”!
This seems like a rather emotional declaration of commitment. Sure it is, when you have experienced what my family had experienced with this wonderful airline.
I have this vacation story to share. Although it is really ordinary, it speaks so much about this airline. It will be really an injustice if I did not write about this to give our salutation to Dragon Air, and to give some valuable insights to all tourism-related organizations of what delivering excellent customer service is all about.
My family and I got back to Kuala Lumpur from our 2 weeks vacation trips to China and Hong Kong. Two days later after stepping back home, we then realized the shopping bag containing a couple of T-shirts my son and I bought at the tempting shops of Hong Kong airport was not with us!
My wife and I tried to recall how this could have happened. Thanks to her good memory (as usual) we managed to trace the chain of events that took place.
We bought them at Hong Kong airport before boarding our flight on Dragon Air to Xiamen, the last leg of our holiday. With no time to put it into our hand carry bag, this shopping bag was pushed in between the many other bags in the overhead compartment. When we touched down at Xiamen airport, we had entirely forgotten that we had an extra bag to take along. We spent 10 days in Xiamen, and at no material time did we realize that this shopping bag was not with us.
What it means is we only made this shocking discovery more than 10 days later! For a while, we were resigned to the fact we had to bite the bullet for our carelessness. Negative self-talks ran inside us which ranged from: ‘who would be so kind to keep this for us, maybe it dropped off, other passengers (or the flight crew members) may have taken them, the airline wouldn’t be bothered to ‘just forget it’.’
At times of crisis like this one, being a corporate coach helps. Thanks to our training that we must be consistently positive and always have hope, we tried our luck. I suggested we should contact the airline, and delegated this task to my wife, Angeline. Not terribly convinced and half heartedly, she wrote an email to Dragon Air’s Customer Service Department to explain the case with details of the flight and shopping bag.
Within 24 hours, Dragon Air shot back an email to us with a scanned photo of the bag for our verification. We said yes. A call from Hong Kong followed from a very well-mannered and professional customer service officer who gave us instructions on how we could pick up it up at KLIA Airport. From our first email to finally collecting it, the process took 5 days in a very seamless and professional execution of customer service delivery that we will always remember.
In the eyes of Dragon Air, this simple ‘shopping bag’ case could have been a small routine act of customer service for an ordinary customer. But to me, it speaks volumes of an organization that does not just talk about ‘customer is first’ but put it in action
The truth is all companies talk about providing customer service excellence. Unfortunately, very few live up to this. When comes to the crunch, whether it is about appealing for a refund, requesting for a replacement, or even asking for more information, we are often met with stares, sulky looks and rude talking front liners who make things very difficult. In many cases, the customers are disappointed.
In reality, there is no evidence of good customer service until and unless the organization is put though a test. This is where the ‘rubber hits the road’ and the truth will prevail. So organizations that are sincere about delivering customer service excellence must really put their acts together to serve their customers in good and ‘bad’ times. This will make it imperative that their people are constantly been trained to fire up their passion to serve, to building a seamless customer service delivery system that will promote their brand names in good and bad times.
Dragon Air is doing this all the time. So now you know why we will want to fly Dragon Air again, and forever!
Do you have a similar heart-warming experience to share with me and other readers? Click on “Comment” to post your story.