Cebu Pacific promises friendlier skies

Inside a war room of sorts within Cebu Pacific’s sprawling Airline Operations Center in Pasay near the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA), agents, perhaps with bated breath, are glued to giant monitors that show the airline’s social media accounts.

Their job is to monitor complaints, requests and other concerns from customers – and to respond to these avalanche of posts – as soon as possible.

Welcome to Cebu Pacific’s Customer Care Center, a 24/7 office dedicated to responding to the budget carrier’s millions of customers – whether they are fuming mad, frustrated or happy with the airline’s service.

To an outsider like me, the war room seems dizzying and chaotic but for the carrier, it is a testament to its commitment to step up its game by being more focused on its customers than it was ever before.

“I think the focus on doing the really important things has gone up... As a business, we’re now more focused on customer aspects than we ever were,” said Michael “Mike” Szucs, CEO of Cebu Air Inc.

Philippine STAR colleague Elijah Rosales and I are inside the company’s command center with Scuzs and his team, president Alexander Lao, CFO Mark Cezar, VP Candice Iyog and spokesperson Carmina Romero, learning about Cebu Pacific’s initiatives.

It’s my first time to meet Szucs and as I told him, I’m happy to finally meet “the famous Mike,” because I’ve long heard about his excellent and strategic leadership in different global airlines and in CEB itself.

Szucs, a licensed pilot and a veteran airline executive armed with an aeronautical engineering degree, knows the aviation industry like the back of his hand.

During our meeting, however, he acknowledged that the industry – and the rest of the world – have been seeing dizzying and challenging changes.

“And that is where I would characterize it... despite the enormous challenges everybody in every walk of life is facing at the moment – such as the enormous unpredictability – we have put in the focus on going above and beyond what we have done before,” he said.

Thus, learning its lessons from a barrage of horror stories from customers in recent years which triggered a Senate investigation last June, Cebu Pacific has