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Just When You Thought the Airline Customer Experience Couldn't Get Worse

October 27, 2014

‘Tis the season to be grumpy.  Hell-bent on making our customer experience even less enjoyable and more costly, the airlines are at it again. And, as will be detailed below, this is a trend that is not specific to their vertical market and is certainly something to keep an eye on.


As those of you who follow my postings on the Contact Center Solutions Community are aware, occasionally I like to illustrate a point with a personal experience. What I will relate a bit further on was not going to be a topic for repetition, but a posting by founder and CEO of Comunitech Services, Neal Schact, about his vacation marred by lost luggage travails,  got the juices flowing.

In Shact’s case he used his misfortune to highlight how siloed customer information made the airline’s contact center’s ability to correctly tell him when he could get his luggage impossible. As somebody who has had an identical experience, on more than one occasion, all I can say is Neal, I feel your pain. However, his exhortation that this can be a call to action for the contact center solutions providers to help the airlines do better on this front, may not apply to my own experience. As you will see, from their perspective in terms of their financial performance they are doing better, just not by us who use their services. We do not and never have mattered as much as the bottom line.

Assuming I have piqued your curiosity here it is in a nutshell. In celebration of a family event, I decided it would be great if our two adult children and their significant others joined my wife and I on a vacation that would require all of us to fly. Without identifying the airline, since this is apparently becoming standard industry operating procedure, we went online to book our flights. All we wished to do was use miles for two people, pay for the other four and try to have where applicable the seats of those on miles and paying near each other.  That’s when it became tricky and disconcerting.

It turns out that you cannot do the above online. What you can do is call an airline contact center and for $25 per ticket have a live agent make the arrangements. It is the only way the paid tickets and rewards tickets can be located according to your wishes. You read correctly. In effect they charged me $100 extra to talk to an agent.  Yikes!

Given this is the same gang who got rid of complimentary food on flights, charges for Wi-Fi, one of many carriers now charging for in-flight entertainment and I am told will soon make it so you can only entertain yourself if you have a personal device that is Wi-Fi capable, takes your money big time on baggage, has made it impossible to book seats using rewards on any flight you might wish to take, and has seating conditions for the masses that probably are considered an unsuitable environment in the U.S. by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), this probably is not a surprise. After all, we have limited options thanks to airline industry consolidation. We are ipso facto the definition of “captive audience.”  One can only imagine what is next. Will it be pay toilets?  How about a fresh air breathing fee?  Or, maybe it will be a safe landing fee? The possibilities unfortunately seem limitless.

Back to the point at hand, the decision to charge people to take to a customer care agent is, I fear, a harbinger of things to come. If this becomes accepted practice you can bet that other verticals will adopt the same approach. In fact, look to the airlines and others to perfect this to manage their work flows by charging different prices depending on the time of an interaction and the time it takes to resolve a problem. 

One can only hope that in this age of social media there will be significant customer pushback (pardon the play on words) to dissuade the airlines from continuing this practice.  If nothing else it gives those who really do provide friendlier skies ample opportunity to provide differentiated value by not charging for such calls and promoting that fact. Think here of companies like JetBlue, Southwest and Virgin America.  My hope is that an outcry over this will work and the current offenders cease and desist.

For those with a longish memory you may recall that the banks—another industry which along with telecoms and hospitality companies have never met a service they did not wish to charge for or a new fee they tried to enforce—got a communal wrist slap when they attempted to charge a fee for speaking with a teller rather than use an ATM machine. 

There is an old joke about the definition of the Yiddish word “chutzpah” being a child who commits premeditated murder of their parents pleading for court mercy because they are orphaned. This clearly falls into that category. If nothing else it certainly is going to impact my selection of airlines when I have a choice regardless of how many miles I have in a “rewards” program I can’t typically use.

Safe travels and don’t forget to have a great customer experience. Just be prepared to pay for it


Edited by Stefania Viscusi



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