FlyerTalk Forums - View Single Post - What exactly can/does the AC concierge do?
Old Jun 15, 2014 | 12:35 pm
  #141  
Sean Peever
10 Countries Visited
20 Countries Visited
30 Countries Visited
10 Years on Site
 
Join Date: Jul 2013
Location: MLL / AC Cafe
Programs: It's hard to get status when the website won't let me book flights.
Posts: 5,771
Originally Posted by flybit
really this is a service that has outlived its usefulness. AC should cut it and spend them money on something else.
This would negatively impact AC in my opinion. From my experience with the concierge's they are always quite busy. The things they are working on / requests that the SE's have would not go away, they would simply transfer to other AC Agents (Gate Agents, Checkin Agents, Lounge Agents, etc).

The Concierge benefit for SE's is of course great! But it's actually a smart business move by AC as well. By providing a dedicated person for the travellers with the most unique needs or requests removes those needs and requests from clogging up the other Agents and keeping things moving quickly at the airport for the rest of the customer base.

They also get improvements in speed of service and contact time with the Clients by having the concierge. Often a request that an SE has can be handled in half the time (or less) by the concierge vs what it takes regular agent to handle. This is simply because they are focusing the most unique and complicated requests with concierge and they get faster and faster at completing them.

While I do not know the origin of the concierge, from my experience in these types of things I would guess it grew out of both a need and a client request. I would imagine that before the concierge existed what would happen is that the most frequent travellers would still have their requests and needs, and when the regular staff couldn't help or didn't know how to help they would say "well go see Bob, he knows how to help you" and then over time the FF's would just start going to Bob directly because they knew he could help. The Concierge program was probably introduced to formalize this process, give control over it, and give guidance to it. Also to then sell it as a benefit as SE.

Reverting back to a non-concierge program would inevitably result in all the same requests going to the first agent a FF sees in the airport tying up agents in a busy and tightly timed environment.
Sean Peever is offline