Call Centre: UA vs AC
 

With all the talk about Air Canada hold times I thought I'd share my recent experience with United.

Called 1-800-UNITED-1 on a Tuesday afternoon (yesterday) for a seat assignment issue. I have no status with United. After a minute with the voice recognition system I was connected with a human who cheerily took care of my issue in a few minutes. Total elapsed time five minutes and I was on to the next thing.

If AC is truly revamping their systems they want might to take a page from United's playbook.

That just about mirrors my recent experience with United as well....

Same same.

interesting how competition makes UA service its customer

Personally I'm not a fan of the voice system that you have to endure at the front end with UA, but I too have found that after wrestling with the voice dude for a couple of minutes an agent is available promptly.

Hopefully AC can give non-status passengers the love without resorting to voice recognition technology.

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (BB10; Touch) AppleWebKit/537.35+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/10.2.1.3247 Mobile Safari/537.35+)

Perhaps the voice recognition system drives away everyone without an urgent problem :D

The UA website does many things that AC website is incapable of. You can save reservations in your account that have been booked elsewhere. You can request upgrades for yourself and others. You can select seats and special meals. You can see the PNRs for partner flights.

You can change award reservations yourself online (for free if you have status) or you can cancel them. You can search for award space much more easily than on AE's website.

The app is simply amazing. You can check your flight status, see where your flight is coming from and if it's on time. You can see where you are on the upgrade list. OMG!

Those are just off the top of my head. I'm sure there is more.

IMO, UA's phone service is so much better than AC's.
Even before I had any sort of tier with UA, I hardly had to wait for an agent to pick up the call every time I called in.

I feel less special now. I thought the reason that I never have to wait with UA is because I'm a top-tier UA elite and that everyone else must have to be on hold 45+ minutes like I do whenever I have to call AC just to select a seat. ;)

Is there only 1 person taking calls at AC? Last time I called, I had to wait 90 minutes before being able to speak to a live person..

UA takes their calls almost instantaneously.

Ben Smith did say things would improve by beginning of Q4. Seems this will be accomplished by getting rid of customers instead of adding CSRs.

Hopefully the call centre situation will improve about the same time they close down the YWG call centre in 2016. :D