I'd love to get my hands on the data
Mostly a rant, but it got me thinking about data, and making sure fruit is properly boxed before analysis so we're not comparing apples to watermelons and grapes to cranberries ... not without adjustments, that is.
Work wanted to do a last-minute change of my onsite plans, and asked if I'd gotten a refundable ticket for the flight. Since it had been booked on Delta, rather than my usual Southwest, I didn't have high hopes.
The ticket receipt in my email was no use. The website was no use. Stalling. Errors. Timeouts. I could access the policies pages and find that it would be $200 to change IF changes were allowed. But I couldn't find out if changes were allowed for my specific class of ticket.
So, I gave up and called customer no-service. The machine greeted me by name when it picked up, pointing out that it had matched this phone number with my frequent flyer record. Great. Now I feel STALKED. It also chirpily informed me that I could disable the personalized greeting by saying something at the main menu to go into an option. Crap, it's a verbal-responses-only system - another pet peeve. OK, I made an actual physical note to go request I be put back into the menu system after getting my info, so I could turn off the reminder I'm being tracked.
Then for the next 20+ minutes, I get unoffensive hold music that is interspersed with very annoying, MUCH louder than the background music, full of cheerful sales pitches and exhortations to visit their web site. Screw you, if I could have done this via the web site, I WOULD HAVE. Double-screw-you that I'm calling with a problem, and you are trying to sell me stuff - I don't take upsell attempts very well.
After almost 30 minutes on hold, during which my husband lovingly prepared and brought me a dinner that I was too pissed to appreciate, and during which the manager texted me twice for an answer on the ticket question, I gave up. I told him that it was probably changeable, but would be $200 plus whatever airfare difference was involved (the new fare would likely be lower than the Thanksgiving-week-jacked-up-fare, but lower-cost never gets passed on, only higher, in my experience).
And of course, since I hung up, the damned personalized stalker-reminder is not turned off.
This is why I fly Southwest whenever possible. Gods they make all that stuff so easy, AND somehow they manage to stay in business, with cheerful employees who seem to like their work, without charging $200 in change fees and $50 to check a suitcase round trip. And Southwest doesn't have credit-card-affiliate-kiosk staffers who pounce on us slow-walkers-with-canes because we CAN'T just breeze by and pretend to ignore them ... I dread that walk down the Delta concourse at Hartsfield. They don't take refusal-to-make-eye-contact, making-a-wide-circle-around-the-kiosk-to-walk-on-other-side-of-corridor, and shaking-the-head-No as hints that we don't want to stop and be sold something. Only them STOPPING me (even if it involves going across the aisle to do so), asking if I want their goddamned affiliate card, and me verbalizing NO, is sufficient. They aren't as aggressive with the able-bodied who can get away from them.
Why is an able-bodied person who evades eye contact, pretends not to hear you, and shakes their head No, allowed to continue, but someone with a cane must be stopped and physically say "NO"? Does having a cane somehow negate all of the other non-verbal signals of NO I DO NOT WANT TO INTERACT WITH YOU? Does walking at a sharp diagonal heading to the other side of the aisle really secretly mean "I want you to chase me down, stand in front of me, touch my arm to stop me, and try to sell me something!"? (Yes, that has happened)
So yeah, I really hate it when I have to do anything involving Delta. This trip hasn't even started and I've already had a bad experience with them, and am reliving previous bad experiences.
Maybe in Delta's back office they've got software that will compare abandoned calls with web activity and put the figures together and realize here was a customer who tried for over an hour and was unable to get help. I'd do that analysis, I do that stuff in my sleep now. There's a lot of good info to be found with comparing web activity for a logged-in user to subsequent calls - log and parse your data right and you can see exactly what they were trying to do, then compare it to what they did do over the phone = Here is something we might be able to make easier to do online to further cut down on phone calls and let us eliminate more jobs!
What that won't tell them is how many flights I have taken in the recent past that were not on Delta. They see only the long gap between flights. They won't see the many flights in each gap that they were not chosen for. Southwestern has far better customer service, doesn't target the mobility-impaired for sales pitches, less hassle when boarding, and costs less most of the time once the checked bag fees are added to the other airlines' ticket prices. Much of the "less hassle" is, IMO, due to the lack of bag fees making people more willing to check bags rather than try and wrestle everything into carry-on and the overhead bins.
To use credit card terminology, Southwest is "front of the wallet" and Delta/USAir/etc are "back of the wallet". Frontier and Spirit, with their "we really, really hate our customers" fees, are not even in the wallet any more.
Now if we could just convince Southwest's website to not require we accept a dozen cookies just to look up possible flights when preparing a quote, it would be even nicer.
The clients never believe that I truly would prefer to drive the 6-8 hours than fly, even when mileage reimbursement is capped at what the airfare would be. But sometimes schedules don't work out to allow driving.
Work wanted to do a last-minute change of my onsite plans, and asked if I'd gotten a refundable ticket for the flight. Since it had been booked on Delta, rather than my usual Southwest, I didn't have high hopes.
The ticket receipt in my email was no use. The website was no use. Stalling. Errors. Timeouts. I could access the policies pages and find that it would be $200 to change IF changes were allowed. But I couldn't find out if changes were allowed for my specific class of ticket.
So, I gave up and called customer no-service. The machine greeted me by name when it picked up, pointing out that it had matched this phone number with my frequent flyer record. Great. Now I feel STALKED. It also chirpily informed me that I could disable the personalized greeting by saying something at the main menu to go into an option. Crap, it's a verbal-responses-only system - another pet peeve. OK, I made an actual physical note to go request I be put back into the menu system after getting my info, so I could turn off the reminder I'm being tracked.
Then for the next 20+ minutes, I get unoffensive hold music that is interspersed with very annoying, MUCH louder than the background music, full of cheerful sales pitches and exhortations to visit their web site. Screw you, if I could have done this via the web site, I WOULD HAVE. Double-screw-you that I'm calling with a problem, and you are trying to sell me stuff - I don't take upsell attempts very well.
After almost 30 minutes on hold, during which my husband lovingly prepared and brought me a dinner that I was too pissed to appreciate, and during which the manager texted me twice for an answer on the ticket question, I gave up. I told him that it was probably changeable, but would be $200 plus whatever airfare difference was involved (the new fare would likely be lower than the Thanksgiving-week-jacked-up-fare, but lower-cost never gets passed on, only higher, in my experience).
And of course, since I hung up, the damned personalized stalker-reminder is not turned off.
This is why I fly Southwest whenever possible. Gods they make all that stuff so easy, AND somehow they manage to stay in business, with cheerful employees who seem to like their work, without charging $200 in change fees and $50 to check a suitcase round trip. And Southwest doesn't have credit-card-affiliate-kiosk staffers who pounce on us slow-walkers-with-canes because we CAN'T just breeze by and pretend to ignore them ... I dread that walk down the Delta concourse at Hartsfield. They don't take refusal-to-make-eye-contact, making-a-wide-circle-around-the-kiosk-to-walk-on-other-side-of-corridor, and shaking-the-head-No as hints that we don't want to stop and be sold something. Only them STOPPING me (even if it involves going across the aisle to do so), asking if I want their goddamned affiliate card, and me verbalizing NO, is sufficient. They aren't as aggressive with the able-bodied who can get away from them.
Why is an able-bodied person who evades eye contact, pretends not to hear you, and shakes their head No, allowed to continue, but someone with a cane must be stopped and physically say "NO"? Does having a cane somehow negate all of the other non-verbal signals of NO I DO NOT WANT TO INTERACT WITH YOU? Does walking at a sharp diagonal heading to the other side of the aisle really secretly mean "I want you to chase me down, stand in front of me, touch my arm to stop me, and try to sell me something!"? (Yes, that has happened)
So yeah, I really hate it when I have to do anything involving Delta. This trip hasn't even started and I've already had a bad experience with them, and am reliving previous bad experiences.
Maybe in Delta's back office they've got software that will compare abandoned calls with web activity and put the figures together and realize here was a customer who tried for over an hour and was unable to get help. I'd do that analysis, I do that stuff in my sleep now. There's a lot of good info to be found with comparing web activity for a logged-in user to subsequent calls - log and parse your data right and you can see exactly what they were trying to do, then compare it to what they did do over the phone = Here is something we might be able to make easier to do online to further cut down on phone calls and let us eliminate more jobs!
What that won't tell them is how many flights I have taken in the recent past that were not on Delta. They see only the long gap between flights. They won't see the many flights in each gap that they were not chosen for. Southwestern has far better customer service, doesn't target the mobility-impaired for sales pitches, less hassle when boarding, and costs less most of the time once the checked bag fees are added to the other airlines' ticket prices. Much of the "less hassle" is, IMO, due to the lack of bag fees making people more willing to check bags rather than try and wrestle everything into carry-on and the overhead bins.
To use credit card terminology, Southwest is "front of the wallet" and Delta/USAir/etc are "back of the wallet". Frontier and Spirit, with their "we really, really hate our customers" fees, are not even in the wallet any more.
Now if we could just convince Southwest's website to not require we accept a dozen cookies just to look up possible flights when preparing a quote, it would be even nicer.
The clients never believe that I truly would prefer to drive the 6-8 hours than fly, even when mileage reimbursement is capped at what the airfare would be. But sometimes schedules don't work out to allow driving.