Qantas’s promise to customers after blow out in time to resolve complaints

Qantas took an average 97 days to solve customer complaints in 2023, the latest industry report shows, but the airline says that time frame has been greatly reduced.

Refund requests and flight delays and cancellations were the most complained about issues by airline customers in 2023, with Virgin Australia attracting slightly more gripes than Qantas but the flying kangaroo taking much longer to resolve problems.

The annual report of the Airline Customer Advocate showed “eligible” complaints increased 9 per cent last year, in line with the growth in passenger numbers, to 1408.

A complaint was considered eligible if it related to a participating airline’s service and the customer had already tried to resolve the problem directly with the airline concerned.

The complaint also needed to fall into one of 15 categories, including conditions of carriage, safety, airport lounges, alleged discrimination, and loyalty programs. Food and beverage was not included.

More than a third of complaints received were about refunds, closely followed by flight delays and cancellations, with baggage services a distant third, fees or charges fourth and loyalty programs fifth.

Given 67.6 million people were carried on Qantas, Jetstar, Rex and Virgin Australia last year, the complaints to the ACA represented a tiny fraction of passenger numbers.

The report showed Virgin Australia had the highest rate of complaints about flight delays and cancellations at 0.0114 per 1000 passengers, and the highest rate of complaints about refunds, at 0.0109 per 1000.

Complaints about flight delays and cancellations at Jetstar amounted to 0.0104 per cent of passengers, and 0.0032 per 1000 at Qantas.

Although Qantas’ complaints were down on previous years, the report noted the airline took the longest to resolve customer issues, at an average 97 days.

In contrast Virgin Australia took an average 16 days, and Rex 19 days.

Qantas’s result was pushed up by a poor performance in the first half of the 2023 calendar year when the airline was taking over 100 days to sort out complaints.

By the end of 2023, the average was 15 days.

Qantas has committed to becoming easier to deal with, after taking the longest of any domestic airline to deal with complaints in 2023. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Jeremy Piper

The airline’s chief customer and digital officer Catriona Larritt said Qantas had made a commitment to become “easier to deal with” and had invested a lot in improving the customer experience.

“In this half year, we’re down to 11 days to finalise complaints but we’re not done yet,” said Ms Larritt.

“As we look forward, what we continue to focus on is delivering a better experience overall because if you do it right the first time, it doesn’t turn into a complaint but then we’re also trying to be more proactive at handling issues and recovering when there are service failures.”

Executive manager of digital and direct customer experience Scott Wilkinson said a “big part” of the journey had been more staff in contact centres, and better processes and technology.

“18 months ago we had the Loyalty database but we didn’t have a customer relationship management (CRM) system which made it hard for us to understand what the customers’ root cause and their history was, which meant our first contact resolution had a lot of escalations,” Mr Wilkinson said.

“In March last year we rolled out our first CRM system which I think is the single biggest thing that made the difference because it meant our agents were able to service the relationship versus servicing a transaction.”

Mr Wilkinson said his team also played close attention to Facebook forums where Qantas customers aired their grievances in an effort to “understand what they were thinking”.

“I’ve got a view that things are going to go wrong, they always do in operational businesses, but we shouldn’t have to make our customers do all the hard work and tell us when things go wrong,” he said.

“Our systems have to be good enough to tell us and then we need to put it right. The CRM was a core enabler for us to start on that journey.”

A Virgin Australia spokesman said the airline’s operational performance had improved significantly since 2023, and customer complaints were resolved faster than any other carrier.

“Earlier this year we expanded our Australian-first baggage tracking functionality in the Virgin Australia app across our domestic and international network, which followed the launch of our self-service disruption management tool, Rapid Rebook, in 2023,” he said.

Originally published as Qantas’s promise to customers after blow out in time to resolve complaints