Originally Posted by
cedric
Post travel resolution is rarely time sensitive, it's not exactly an area that businesses want to allocate resources to when there's no calculable ROI.
If you were running AS and had some funds to allocate, would you increase the budget to a cost centre like post travel support, or would you invest it in something that will improve guest experience like new lounges, Starlink installations, etc?
Why is that an either/or question?
Airlines created loyalty programs to get more of the travel dollars by giving travelers a reason to buy more often from them. Poor/non-responsive customer service seems to be the opposite: people already had a bad customer experience, and now you are giving them a bad experience a second time. Which then leads to DOT complaints or some people going other routes for relief (small claims court?) that aren’t exactly good for the airline.
If you run a customer service department, you need to have staffing that is able to deal with the routine inflow of messages. E.g., if you have 100 incoming requests per day and a service rep can deal with 20 per day, you need five reps to not build up an ever increasing backlog. And obviously you need staffing to deal with sick days, vacations, and occasional “incidents” that lead to higher volumes of incoming requests (system meltdowns, anyone?).
To me a months long backlog seems to be an indication that they don’t have the necessary staffing to handle requests in a timely fashion (I’d love to know what their target response time is). Which may be the result of problems that need fixing elsewhere (to reduce the inflow). E.g., I had to send a request earlier this year when the 10k perk (double miles with partners) didn’t work. How many other requests did they get just from this one IT bug?