Stuck on the Plane
It had all started off well enough with a push back from the gate at Antalya airport more or less on time. But two hours had passed since a laconic announcement from the pilot told us that a ‘minor technical fault’ meant us returning to the gate to get it fixed. By now the cabin of the Thomas Cook 757 to Gatwick was filled with people standing, chatting and queuing for the loos in spite of increasingly desperate and increasingly ignored calls for us to remain in our seats and not use the toilets. However the passenger mix of older people and young families each had equally pressing but different reasons to insist on going whatever the cabin crew said. Others were forming mutinous clumps muttering that the captain should tell us what was happening. We had a right to know. Nothing appeared to be happening outside in a darkened airfield.
A ‘Breach in Security’
And then the man in charge obliged. He told us that “there had been a breach in security”. Three passengers had been removed because of an overheard conversation between them. The plane would be searched by the Turkish authorities. We were to get buses back to the terminal and wait there until re-boarded at the end of the search to return to Gatwick. We took off just in time before the crew’s hours ran out and returned home to a deserted airport at 2am – 6 hours late.
Just a reminder that security incidents can touch us all and that such events can unfold leaving even those directly affected in virtually total ignorance of what had happened. As far as I and all the others in the back cabin were concerned, the events all took place at the other end of a big plane and we saw and heard nothing. Only after we had boarded our buses for a very long ride back to the terminals did it become clear that we had been parked a long way away from everything else and that was a large military helicopter behind our plane.
In the event, it all ended well for most of us – I have no idea what happened to the three passengers who were taken away for questioning. One thing for certain is that they will not be flying home courtesy of Thomas Cook.
Full marks for the young crew whose training saw them through what was for all of them, a first time experience. The situation that saw them lost for solutions was the failed efforts to keep us all penned in our seats once the initial ‘necessary lie’ about a minor technical fault had lost its power to influence our behaviour. The only service failure came on arrival when there were no Thomas Cook staff visible when the plane landed to care for passengers who were upset and scared let alone very late and with all connections missed. Service in an emergency on-board an aircraft does not end at the aircraft door. (The duty free shop was still open of course in case stress had triggered passengers to drain their Antalya-bought supplies.)
As someone who has worked advising organisations and researching the quality of customer service and how users react to their service experiences, several things struck me. The efforts of the cabin crew demonstrated that caring for people in an emergency is a customer service activity. Secondly as a board member of an organisation for customer service professionals, is there a role for the profession and its practitioners in developing this area of customer service? Emergencies have always been with us but planning for them and dealing with them have assumed a new visibility in all our lives.
I believe that skills and techniques developed to manage routine day to day customer service transactions have a value and a role in emergencies and disasters. This contribution may have gone unrecognised and unused in the past in the development of processes and priorities for emergency management where traditionally attention has focused on the ‘hard’ processes of resource deployment, critical medical attention and control of the immediate physical environment. How soon and how much do ‘affective’ (feelings-related) issues get addressed? Can this be reflected in emergency planning tools and standards?
Role for Service Professionals
I suggest that professionals at work such as customer service managers and their staff have a role to play as trained citizens in the succour of their fellow citizens. These workaday ‘civilian’ skills be used in our modern emergencies as they were conscripted in the conflicts of the last century?
Citizens’ Contribution
Finally, what possibility is there of involving us outside the worksplace as citizens and using our own skills and experience in an emergency? Being involved and making a contribution means we have alternatives to being passive and ruled by fear. Instead we can be active in the defence of our own families, neighbours and the UK. Again I declare a professional interest – working in what the Health Service calls Patient and Public Involvement.
A Subject of Public Interest
The questions around the service people get in an emergency are not mine alone. The need for good service in these circumstances has been made by others. The National Audit Office conducted “A Review of the Experiences of United Kingdom Nationals affected by the Indian Ocean Tsunami” based on collecting the experiences and views of UK nationals affected by the tsunami. For the first time to my knowledge, the experience of those directly affected was systematically collected to be set alongside the perspective of the service provider – in this case the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The report concluded that
“the overall balance of experience was that the assistance provided …was perceived as piecemeal, inconsistent and inadequate“.
This powerful set of findings show how poor many felt that service had been.
“Of those respondents who had direct contact with UK officials, many reported negative experiences about their manner”. The findings go on to report that the level of service itself was lacking in many areas of high importance for those directly affected by the event and their families. The FCO and all the other organisations involved – the police, the airport managers, the utilities, the media and other government departments such as the Department for Culture, Media and Sport – need to understand the need to provide “direct support with empathy“.
These are the human and behavioural approaches needed. Classic customer service practice demands that they be backed up by user-led and strong, effective processes.
We can look and see what such processes would have to designed to cope with, in three other important reports published in the UK. The first is the earlier report by the UK National Audit Office “Consular Services to British Nationals” which considered the quality of the service’s response to the Indian Ocean Tsunami. In September 2006, the Home Office report “Addressing lessons from the emergency response to the 7 July 2005 London bombings” came out and at the same time “Looking Back, Moving Forward – The Multi-Agency Debrief” was published by the London Regional Resilience Forum. The last report drew on an earlier London Assembly report “Report of the 7 July Review Committee“.
For the customer service manager, there are some common themes in all these reports – system overload, a need for communication, a need to gather facts and provide a consistent and accurate response to the questions asked. There are human (not just clinical ) needs to be met amongst those who were there when things went bad but were not injured (apparently). There were the needs of those who needed to know whether family or friends had been involved and affected. To say these issues of communication and content are customer service questions that arise in the day to day work of those who manage in-bound customer contact centres, is not intended to minimise the extreme nature of the events that these three reports describe and the subsequent pain and grief to so many. The point I am making is that skills acquired in calmer circumstances can with the appropriate preparation and training be used in emergencies.
Service Planning Cycle
We can invoke a traditional service development process using traditional service cycle analysis over the period of the episode where we see both sorts of service – ‘mass’ service where basic needs are catered for a large body of people using the resources available – the primary and most urgent need being survival – followed by services which increasingly look at the needs of individuals involved on a case by case basis.
An emergency in its earliest stages may override all considerations bar those associated with saving and preserving life applying clinical disciplines such as triage. Thereafter the ‘softer’ customer service elements would come increasingly into play.
It is not part of my intention in this article to develop such a plan in detail. It is enough to show some of the principal considerations. The first consideration is that it is the values of the organisations involved that are the starting point – what are the values that for example, an organisation like the Consular Service needs to develop and promulgate amongst its staff and volunteers in the face of a similar emergency? (Try Istanbul after the earthquake as a scenario).
Why stress values? Because an emergency by definition will always give rise to the unexpected, the unpredicted. There will be situations that arise where the solutions are not in the manual. Even if they are, details of process will be forgotten by many. So the emergency worker will respond on the basis of the values that an organisation stands for.
Universal Values?
It is always difficult to ascribe universal generic values/ principles that underpin all service development in this context but examples would be:-
- Recognition of the value of an individual life
- Empathic care for survivors and mourners afflicted by the tragedy at the time and subsequently
- Respect for the dead expressed in relation to cultural norms
- Respect for and connection with the feelings of relatives and other carers
- Readiness to assume responsibility using flexible procedures to allow for individual preferences and foster individual decision making in light of circumstances
- Recognition of needs of staff and those in organisations offering assistance
- Equity of treatment tempered by circumstances
- Right to Information
- Honesty and readiness to admit ignorance
Processes
Turning to the processes themselves, we know the sort of processes that have to be in place and the stresses they are subject to. The Home Office report on the London bombings described the police Casualty Bureau phone line receiving “at its peak, 43,000 attempted calls an hour”. This level of demand could not have come as a complete surprise since the National Audit Office reported that in December 2004, “police call lines were receiving up to 11,000 calls per hour at the height of the (tsunami) crisis.”
There is a need then to construct a technology that can manage these huge albeit temporary volumes. Happily for us, there is an existing experience and technical capacity already in place to cope with much of this demand. Much of it is tried and tested. There is a precedent of co-operation developed for happier occasions such as the big charitable events like Children in Need where BT works with an organising body and develops a plan to manage all the calls working with the call centres of other organisations such as Boots. We have a national resource accustomed to working with partners and setting up networks to cope with very high call volumes on either a regional or national basis. This is an experience that is there to be used. We must of course look beyond the technology of network capacities and assess the human needs to be met.
7 Needs
The Home Office report grouped the issues and the actions under 7 main headings:
- Giving people the information they need
- Practical and emotional support
- Sharing of information
- Health Services
- Treating the dead with dignity and respect
- International Response.
The first three issues fall within the skills and competencies of many customer service professional in their roles as managers and practitioners of the skills of customer contact. The profession can help for example in what the London Regional Resilience Forum called the need to “pre-plan cascade routes, so that in future specific information can be targeted at different sections of the public (for example to local residents, commuters, minority communities, employers, schools and off-duty responders such as transport and emergency staff)”. Also there is now to be an appropriate Service Level Agreement between the Police and the Foreign Office and behind that agreement will be plans for access to supplementary resources.
Commandeering the Call Centre
Might other ‘civilian’ call centres be commandeered in the event of an emergency in the same way that merchant vessels can be taken into the service of the State in time of war? The managers and staff of these call centre understand the principles of good service and the importance of such a role. A recent estimate of the numbers employed in such centres puts the figure at 800,000. There is a proven national capacity to plan and manage networks of service providers. There are a variety of technical issues to be sorted out as well as ‘who pays?’ question – this last will come up for example if resources have to be permanently reserved for ‘emergencies only’. There are other relevant precedents such as the London Media Emergency Forum where practitioners with relevant skills become involved in planning and preparation. Nothing insoluble here.
So that leaves us with the biggest question of all – how can we as citizens be more involved outside the workplace? We are used to seeing the Home Guard as personified by Captain Mannering and his cohorts as figures of fun. But the Local Defence Volunteers as they were first called were volunteers responding to an emergency need. However, the threat is not as stark now as the post-Dunkirk days and we do not need 1.5 million men volunteering to carry arms.
Times as well as the nature of the threat have changed. We are now advised in the interests of a risk-free life to let the professionals do the job. We are asked to keep ourselves out of harms way and stay at home while the streets are made safe. Security professionals set great store by security and may well be reluctant to think about letting the unqualified layman or woman into the secret. As the Intelligence UK website says when discussing threat levels
“The security measures taken to protect people and Critical National Infrastructure will not be announced publicly, to avoid informing terrorists about what we know and what we are doing about it. Because response levels are the result of detailed assessments of risk to specific elements of the Critical National Infrastructure, changes in the national threat level will not necessarily produce changes to the sector-specific response levels.“
Is that clear, citizens? And while we are at it, answer this question off the top of your head – what do ‘substantial’ and ‘severe’ mean in the context of threat levels and which is worse?
I am back on the Thomas Cook plane – told nothing because to tell us is to tell the suspects. The threat level information does not give specific advice to citizens – it urges vigilance and gives a number to call if you suspect anything.
Given these hesitations and difficulties, what does citizen participation in informal non-statutory ways look like in this context? For starters, it looks like the tsunami survivor survey done for the National Audit Office that we have quoted already in this article. Very sensitively conducted under the auspices of the Zito Trust, we have to thank the 132 that took part for contributing to an exercise that will benefit their fellow citizens. They gave their time to revisit what was an appalling experience and this form of participation is invaluable. We must hope that the authorities respond appropriately.
And how will that response be monitored? Well why not ask those who were interviewed if they would like to be a member of a citizens’ panel for 6 months or a year? Invitations could also be issued to survivors of the 7/7 bombings whose experiences of service both good and bad were set out in the Home Office report and the subsequent London Assembly and Resilience Forum reports.
In fostering and building capacity for citizen and user involvement, which again is something I do, I and my partners always seek to bear in mind the heavy responsibility of not wasting the time and energy of the public representative at this level. We must also match the arrangements made for the inclusion and solicitation of their points of view to their capacity and circumstances. We therefore do not recommend that representative groups be set up to track the work of existing planning groups whose work may indeed be secret in the sort of model that is applied to the former nationalised utilities – what others might call the ‘EmergencyWatch’ model.
Three models of Involvement
Instead we could build on three models. The first is that of user research -both qualitative and quantitative. The second is to draw on the experience of those who have been through a disaster and ask them to participate in the planning for future events as discussed above.
The third model unites both the citizen at home and at work with business or sector-specific involvement. Businesses in the financial services sector in the City of London are already involved in planning groups but even here the London Resilience Forum recommended more work in discovering the information needs in order that businesses could make their own decisions – a principle to be applied for all information that supports our autonomy and responsibilities for ourselves as citizens.
It all beats sitting at home being scared.
Travel | Colin Adamson | 
January 6, 2012 6:32 pm | 
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At the end of my 