Originally Posted by
Random50
I think there’s been a clear trend in all industries the last few years of stripping customer service agents of their ability to do anything but follow the script. Used to be the first agent you reached could apply discretion if they wanted. Then it became only the supervisor. Now it’s pretty typical for entire departments to have no authority. If all customer service does is follow scripts, it’s only a matter of time until the whole lot gets automated.
Whilst I think that your general point is correct, as mentioned by others upthread, BA (and for that matter other airlines) do give agents some level of discretion, and in addition to what
Anonba, mentioned about overall trends, I think it is fair to say that this discretion has increased during the Covid period. That said, there are two big caveats to bear in mind:
1) Airlines/any companies tend to define areas where agents have discretion, others where they need approval, and others where they have no discretion at all. For instance, as many of us mentioned, had you happened to go to the airport on the same day you missed your flight (admittedly not an option when you got the day wrong, but can matter in many other cases, such as alarm not ringing, miscalculating transport, etc), the airport staff
would have had some discretion to protect your return or even to move you to another flight the same day free of charge. However, the next day, and after the system automatically cancelled the return, then it is one of those cases that the airline considers out of scope for discretion;
2) Discretion is just that. It is not a guarantee that one gets the outcome one wants, but simply that an agent or their supervisor are entrusted to take circumstances into account to decide how far to go beyond (or away from) the written rule/agreed T&Cs. Criteria may include what the agent thinks about the circumstances (compared to other cases they hear every week), the profile of the customer (status, fare, etc) or also some things which may seem unfair (different station managers or different agents may just be more or less generous or more or less sensitive to specific cases and less to others, because discretion, by definition, also brings an element of variation).
FT is usually a great source of information as to what agents typically can and cannot do and under which circumstances, and the more experience you have with BA, the more you start getting a sense of where you might get some help and when not, or how to best present your case, but even the most experienced of passengers will still have occasional good and bad surprises. That is the very nature of discretion.