" ITREALMS: No phone lines @ Virgin Nigeria?

Friday, May 04, 2007

No phone lines @ Virgin Nigeria?

Market Intelligence:

A Nigerian upcoming business executive, Ms Omo Adetayo has some businesses to be recently in another African country.

She was fortunate to have flied the ‘famous’ Virgin Nigeria Airways (VNA) of which she even bought the return ticket, to ensure that her movement in and out of Nigeria as long as the visa avails is certain.

In her weeklong trip, Ms Adetayo was booked to return on Sunday evening of the proceeding week and on Thursday night after going to bed, she developed a stomach-turning symptom that eventually lasted into the morning of Friday. In fact, before the daybreak, she had gone to the toilet for the seventh time.

So, in the morning, Ms Adetayo, decided to reach out to Virgin Nigeria’s office online, since she made up her mind to go on a Saturday, after the initial first aid was taken on Friday.

Unfortunately, this plan was not to be, as she could not locate viable electronic mailing address of VNA local office to enable her return as soon as possible, except for the physical office addresses, which she said were far from her abode in the capital city of the country.

Also, she was unable to see any phone numbers at www.virginnigeria.com/en/ng/ticketing.html, at least, to still call to facilitate the change of her ticket and to avoid getting stranded at the airport, even when the airline had warned that such change could attract $50, about N6,400.

However, her efforts at VNA website indicated that the ticketing offices; of which the site encourages customers to book and pay for tickets, including those who booked on the website or made via the call centre.

One big error, though is that despite the nice words of appeal to customers to use its services via Information and Communication Technology (ICT) tools, such as electronic mails (emails) addresses and telephone lines were completely missing on the site.

From Nigeria to Cameroon, Ghana, Senegal, South Africa and United Kingdom (UK), none of the ticket offices have either an email and telephone lines displayed in the website, alongside the physical location, which is hard to believe.

Therefore, we call on management of Virgin Nigeria Airways and specifically, its Information Technology (IT) staff or web administrator to arise, because building a website or managing same is not only to host company information, but consists of advising the customers appropriately, especially on the content to be made available on their sites as well as double checking to ensure that all is correct.

In this case, even if nothing else, VNA with about 15 local ticket offices in Nigeria, has lost the N6,400 Ms Adetayo should have paid for the change on her flight ticket, among others.

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