Inside Iberia Sara  Martinez
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How things work in the High-Value Customer Services and Experiences Centre

Guadalupe Pérez helps us to understand what a normal day assisting premium customers entails.

Could you tell us what the High-Value Customer Services and Experiences Centre is?

It’s a call centre with about 100 people on the team, and our priority is to provide complete and personalised service to all of our high-value customers.

What is a high-value customer’?

The Iberia Plus Platinum and Iberia Plus Gold members. This is a sector of clients who, for various reasons, travel very regularly and require us to be always available to offer them the assistance they need.

What services do you offer to premium members?

Our main goal is to provide a response to any kind of incident that our members bring to our attention, to anticipate their needs and find alternatives when there’s a situation that changes the established route. That could mean information about schedules, bookings of flights, searching for lost and found items, requesting limousines, responding to social networks. And it’s not just with Iberia – we also work with members of oneworld alliance, where we are leaders in the field of member assistance.

What is the strangest or most complex request you’ve ever faced?

There are so many anecdotes. Like the time a celebrity chef forgot a handwritten notebook of new recipes and we managed to find it in cooperation with the airport. A few years ago, we resolved a flight incident for the chairman of a publishing house and he sent a wonderful collection of books to our department at Christmas. Beyond the anecdotes, we work with people closely and directly, and this creates a trust that endures and increases over time.

How many calls and emails might you receive on an average day?

On a typical day, the number of interactions is around 2,000. Although, there are variables that can make these numbers jump significantly for various reasons – weather, delays or cancellations due to operational causes, strikes, and so on.

Do you have a predetermined amount of time to respond to a customer’s request?

For telephone calls, our goal is to respond to 95 per cent of all the calls we receive and for the waiting times to not exceed 20 seconds. In the case of email requests, our goal is to respond in 24 to 72 hours. Sometimes they only need information, but we also have to contact other areas of the company in order to get results for the customer.

How do you measure the success of your work?

Customer satisfaction – the result of showing empathy in any situation. To do this, in addition to the survey the company does after every flight, our area offers members the chance to assess their satisfaction with the service received and the solution offered at the end of every call. However, the great success of our centre is the human factor, and the personal and professional quality of the people involved. On our team, support and friendship among colleagues make being part of the High-Value Customer Services and Experiences Centre a real joy.

Image credit: Olivia Huete Sánchez