Originally Posted by
RealHJ
There is still an ongoing issue (unless recently fixed at last, I've been told it's been on the list of major bugs to fix for years now) cards where the issuer doesn't support AVS and the AVS response is X. As some who've been involved in testing and rolling it out tell me, devs forgot to put in handling for that so the system simply hangs. I've had that confirmed to me several times. Basically, phone reps need to call the Delta merchant account processor and do phone auth, but most get confused and don't know how to properly do that (they need to find the #, the Delta merchant account, etc., and then key in the phone authorization properly in the system - all things that supposedly "Delta no longer trains" its staff in and that are hardly well documented). Online it works, but doesn't work by phone. By phone only works in the old reservations system/interface that was at least less buggy. Other than phone auth, that is the only other workaround for Delta res agents.
In 5 years, I can count on one hand how often I've had to call for manual credit card authorization. It's not hard, but it is infrequent. Certainly not something that would require extensive training (manual credit card approval IS covered in training).
There is no "old" reservation interface. The current GUI rolled out in early 2013 and the old one was retired summer of 2013. There's Delta Term, which hasn't been worked in by frontline res reps in at least 10 years.
It's not taught to frontline reps anymore because the GUI can do all but 2 things an agent comes across in 99.9% of phone calls. (In case you're wondering, the two things are checking Minimum Connection Time, and unhooking a voucher from a PNR not yet ticketed. And both of those things ARE taught.) Now, to be fair, there are some other functions that can help a frontline specialist, like looking into an old PNR, checking the Upgrade Waitlist, etc. While there is a way to run cards through in DeltaTerm, it uses the exact same address verification system as the GUI, and I haven't had to use it in over a year, and that was because, as I mentioned earlier, a release of the GUI did have a bug that caused forms of payment to get hung up.