Originally Posted by
CJKatl
Yes, CS is down and yes, Marriott also stopped having a presence on FT several years ago, but where do you get that translated into dollars invested holistically? When Marriott exited FT they beefed up their FB and Twitter and started their own fully staffed Insiders site. While we can argue their need to control the message, can you really argue their financial investment? Having a couple people represent the company on websites like FT has got to be cheaper than having people work on Insiders while at the same time paying to run the site, house the site and do IT for the site.
Let's stick to real facts. There is zero evidence SPG spent more on CS and the Lurkers are an example of why that's likely not true. Marriott CS used to be very good. Something is going on and it's become poor, as has SPG's. Hopefully it will be corrected. But it is not a case of where SPG was wonderful while Marriott has always been horrible and let's not turn on each other making stuff up to try to prove that point. Instead everyone should be working together to ask the company to restore what had always been good.
Not sure how much money Marriott put in its twitter team investment.
The poor twitter team member who was fired because he accidentally "liked" a tweet that praised Marriott listing Tibet as a separate entity - that had angered the Mainland China government and the internet crowd mobilized by it - Marriott just fired the guy who did not even know where Tibet was - the workload was so heavy that they went thru several hundreds of tweets an hour during the NFL promo time, so much so more often than not they just "like" any tweet that praises Marriott. The guy made $12 per hour according to the local newspaper of his home town.
The FB and Twitter presence is all smoke and mirror as the teams there are very low-level employees who are not empowered to help customers (unlike the airlines). The Marriott Insider is a site with very little added value the few times I pay a visit.
On the other hand, Lurkers here have helped many FTers, me included, resolved REAL customer service issues.
The mere fact that instead of using the Official Marriott Channel to communicate various information during the transition period, it chose to go thru Lurker but with the strict instruction that anything he communicates must be first approved by the Marriott Loyalty Team. Personally I find this is a strange arrangement and does not show me Marriott actually invest additional to improve its customer services at all.
Oh yes, SPG folks still pick up the phone at the first few rings and all of them I talked to in the past few weeks are knowledgeable. As a comparison I think the shortest wait time to get a Marriott rep was 30 min for me and the longest was almost 2 hours. Well over 50% of the reps have no clue (not their faults as they only know things if they are trained properly - there are no training it so seems. I also got reps based in Mexico City, Manila and in Canada in my last 6 or 7 calls. Get ready you will be randomly connected to whichever contracted overseas call centers to handle your needs.
At least now the phone tree got rid of the lengthy spill of the "Want to know more about the upcoming merger" part, versus a couple weeks ago you are forced to listen well over 5 to 7 min on that robot lady touting the merger before you could ever get out - pressed zero many times would not stop it.
