brian1975

Here's a suggestion for United:

When calling into the customer service lines, agents should give out their unique extension number. In the future, if you want to call back and get good service again from an agent who gave you good service, you enter their unique extension number, and if the agent is working, you get put in their queue and you get to work with that person again.

UA could even track how many folks enter agent extensions and award bonuses to those agents with high request volumes.


--b

MP Goddess

I think the only department that has "extensions" is headquarters. We don't. I don't believe reservations does. It's a fun suggestion, though. But just imagine...you've spoken to this one agent. You like the way he/she knew what they were talking about and you take the extension, and then call back the next day/week/month/whatever. You're on hold. FOR AN HOUR. Why? Because that person knew what they were doing and other people did the same thing you did. That poor agent would get mighty exhausted while David Spade in the cubicle across from him/her sits with his feet up not taking a single call. Seems kind of unfair to make the good agents do all the work, no? Maybe an option that says, "I'm sorry, <insert agent name here> is not available. Would you like to hold, or speak to another representative?" Maybe that would even things out a bit?

Maybe the management bonus could be more fairly used in this manner? Then again, by the time all the infrastructure's in place to set it up to work, the bulk of the management bonuses would be burned up.

ldsant

I have no idea what the last portion of this post means. . but perhaps the "real" solution is that in fact United only KEEPS the good agents.

Why is it that every other company seems to have metrics on their agents and get rid of the "bad" ones yet United can't seem to get rid of the bad agents?

MP Goddess

Unfortunately, the "good" agents are the ones who get paid far more than the "bad" ones, typically. New agents don't have as much invested in the company (seniority, experience), so they're not as good at getting things done in an efficient and still customer-service friendly manner. The theory is, they're less expensive to have on the clock, so the more senior agents get to go home early more often and often get stuck for rule violations much more quickly than the ones who cost the company less money to keep around. Catch-22, if you will.