Originally Posted by
yyznomad
Look, it wasn't like MG was asking for the world. It was a simple ask.
Even if the agent was "taking orders", there are other ways to word the response - it's called soft skills.
Everyone on this website and everyone in the world is the hero of their own story. All of these posters (regardless of their constant aggressiveness and desire to enter scraps on this website) are otherwise in their life uniformly reasonable, polite, kind and gentle. Always the other party is aggressive, rude, impolite and definitely in the wrong. Especially when we can't hear their side.
Anything that is said by anyone needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
Usually it's the message that upsets people, the "Sorry but you can't have that" and the "how it's said" part is flavored by their subjective experience of being told no, you can't have that toy.
Reports of rude agents and horrible staff generally have to be taken with a grain of salt as they are rarely as bad as the person reporting it claims it to be, as it's all taken through their viewpoint where they are already the party to which an injustice is being done.
If she asked for a free seat as a MM'er and the answer was that she doesn't get it as part of the program, if she doesn't agree with that then we all know what to do: HUCA.
These areas of communication is where AC could improve - at no extra cost to them.
Besides, MG just proved a point - she was denied something that she ended up doing herself, meaning that AC could have simply executed the ask for her.
MG was not asking for her buttocks to be kissed and then wiped.
That's fun for hyperbole but the point is only this:
She asked for something the agent was not entitled to give her, or the agent believed she was not entitled to give her.
No agent will ever be perfect. We know we can sit there for 30 minutes and argue about how we know the rules better and it will get us nowhere. And sometimes they actually do know the rules better. But we know in this case when an agent says no you just politely say OK, and then HUCA.
And if the agent really can't deliver what you want, it's not the agent's fault, and I am not arguing that she doesn't deserve that assistance or the benefit.
If I could decide then she would get it.
But I am not deciding: AC execs are deciding this crap and they are the ones that should take the flak for it.
Front line staff usually gets blamed as the messenger. As in the case of OP he thinks that this FA was the rudest person in the world for telling him something he didn't want to hear, that in the interests of all the passengers, would he please close his windowshade. Yet there he was, "that guy", entitlement dripping off of his godlike form like rays of light from the sun, doing something to discomfort the entire cabin.
So, I don't buy the reports. I'd buy the reports of horribly rude staff if I observed more than I have in 20+ years (zero cases) and observed less passengers being entitled self obsessed jerkfaces (every flight).
But in the case where the agent is just factually wrong, it happens, and it will keep happening, and if a customer gets their hackles up because the agent is wrong on something and gets pushy then the agent will tend to get testy too.
It's human nature and the worst job in the world is being customer facing phone support. There are limited ways of fixing that when customers are being irate all day long, even when customers are irate with justification.
AC is setting itself up for conflicts when they are doing things like the carryon checks with zero tolerance and charging bag fees and making the flying process more painful than it should be. Then they give out benefits which they continually peel back and make customers feel even more robbed (this goes exactly against Machiavelli's advice, which is to give people NOTHING because people won't recognize what you give them for any useful amount of time but they will surely remember when you take it away after giving it to them and judge you by that).
Again it points back to the decisions that the execs are making that force the customer facing reps to deal with things that are next to impossible for humans to deal with all day.
Really, if you want a slice of punishment, spend 8 hours on the phone all day dealing with customer requests. It's something I would wish on nobody. I'm amazed that they can even keep their sanity.