Tag Archives for customer service.
With so much time on hold it’s easy to call Delta and listen to their hold music and really pick up the beat. One customer did just that. And played the French horn.
A passenger bought Singapore Airlines tickets online and then decided to call their U.S. customer service line to change their seat assignments. They looked up the number on their American Express statement underneath the charge, since they happened to be logged into the Amex website, and came up with 800-742-3333. The agent picked up right away and informed them a seat change costs $200.
In recent years, Delta has offered the worst customer service by phone with the longest hold times for customers, although of course all airlines have challenges. Fortunately there is a workaround for all of this!
Some airlines just give call priority, others give dedicated agents, and there can be a tradeoff. If dedicated agents are overwhelmed sometimes you just want to get through to someone. During actual high call volume periods an airline might roll over its elite members on hold to the top of the general reservations queue.
Such dynamic call handling makes sense. At American Airlines, though, Platinum Pro members’ calls get priority but will now roll over into general reservations instead of to dedicated elite agents for international bookings according to an internal airline memo.
With the window shutting to earn status for the new year closing on Tuesday night, customers were calling in. This is a new system (Loyalty Points) and a new cutoff (February 28, not December 31). And telephone hold times became excruciating, as numerous customers shared to social media. Wait times stretched in some cases over 5 hours.
Airline call center hold times often got long before the pandemic, one of the more popular features I’ve covered is ways around long hold times – like calling American Airlines foreign call centers, or ringing up Delta’s close-in travel hotline.
But you can always wait – whether it’s an hour, five hours or 40 hours – to reach an agent to help sort out a problem with your ticket, when your flight is cancelled or maybe your reservation just didn’t get ticketed properly. Always, at least, except at Frontier Airlines which has just eliminated telephone customer service.
90% of Americans say they’d choose not to fly an airline after a negative experience with customer support.
I’d like to believe that this were true. It’s coming from a company that sells customer support solutions, so it probably isn’t.
Video of a line for customer service was shared to twitter. It wraps around the customer service area and into the corridor of the terminal – and it just keeps going. Naturally this was American Airlines, and naturally it was in Miami.
Here’s what to do when facing this worst-case scenario.
If you’re a Delta frequent flyer you know how hard it is to get customer service. It’s taking the airline hours to answer phone calls even for their Diamond SkyMiles members, and months after they promised they had the issue under control.
Delta is a ‘full service’ carrier and things can be even worse with the ultra low cost set.
Back in the fall of 2003 United had a guy named Ted going around Denver picking up lunch tabs for entire restaurants. You see, Ted was their new low cost carrier ‘within the airline’ that United was launching. Ted was your friend. He was fun. That’s not how Ted turned out, in fact Ted – which shared the last 3 letters of United – was often described as being “the end of United.” And United retired Ted on January 6, 2009. Around the time that United was paying someone to pick up lunch, US Airways decided it needed to respond and so a guy named “Seth” picked up a few lunch tabs in Crystal City near the carrier’s Arlington, Virginia headquarters. Although by that time US Airways’ low cost carrier within a carrier MetroJet was…
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
