Originally Posted by StSebastian

I had that conversation with an AAgent the other day, but in the other direction. I called the general line to redeem some AA miles with no status and got some great people on the phone -- based not 10 miles down the street here near RDU. When we finished making my very odd reservation to a city US doesn't fly to anymore, we talked about the difficulty in dealing with outsourced reservations and how I appreciated that I could understand her and we got the issue addressed quickly and efficiently.

She pointed out (quite correctly, as demonstrated here) that it doesn't save any money to outsource if the new people answering the phones can't take care of the customers at least as well as the original US-based agents. I told her I didn't have any problem paying the $15 per ticket fee to get these award seats since they'd found things that weren't available on the website and were so useful in trying other routings and partner airlines, even trying to get the other department to free seats when we were able to get all of the legs except one. (It took only two tries to get the flights I wanted, one call for the outbound and one call to adjust the return to a better day.)

Just one of those notes for people who just look at the direct dollar value of outsourcing, and not the extended impact to the customers and ultimately the bottom line.