Help Me Design a Test To See if AA Truly Reads their Complaints
 

Hi,

When-ever I do complain its because I want some procedure changed not because of miles. In all emails I actually write I don't want miles. So it really gets my goat when I get a canned response that is not even read. Just miles thrown at me despite me saying I don't want miles.

My latest furore into this has been complaining about a chronic late luggage problem if I connect in LAX from international flights onto the small planes flying out of Terminal 4 Gates 44A-H. The AA agents on the ground just don't care if the luggage gets their on time and advised me its my fault some how.

So my question to you is what test can I design to determine if AA actually read their complaints and do something about them?

If you help design it I'll try it if its reasonable.

If you know that you've received canned responses, then it seems you can already tell whether AA is truly reading the complaints, right? ;)

In seriousness, what's the point? To me it's quite obvious whether they've actually read my complaint, and if a canned response isn't satisfactory I'll write back until I get a real reply. As for knowing whether they've acted on an individual complaint, that's pretty much impossible, especially when personnel issues are involved.

Given technology complaints are probably scanned with most receiving some kind of canned, automated response. I would not be surprised if most complaint letters never see the eyes of a human being. Unfortunately, unless an issue is widespread chances are nothing is going to be done about it and AA might throw you a bone in the form of miles. Welcome to 21st century customer service.

It sounds as if you think that if you can demonstrate that AA doesn't assign human beings to read and follow up on complaints, you will have scored an important point. I doubt that. It's really not news. Your time would be better spent doing almost anything else.

Perfectly put.

Heh. Where did you get that from, the bit about scoring a point?

My thinking is if AA doesn't read its complaints email then we can just all stop sending them. Who cares about 2K miles ...

But how many can there be? 100 a day? I fly a lot over 200K miles per year if you add up all airlines and I've written no more than 3 complaints in the last year.

You'd be surprised about the amount of complaints an airline receives

Do the math. AAL flies about half a million customers per day. If only one out of every hundred of those complains (very roughly one complaint per 2-3 flights), you've got a couple thousand per day.

Also, as anyone familiar with the basics of natural-language processing can tell you, an individual complaint doesn't necessarily have to be seen by a human in order to make a difference.

I suspect AA averages more then 33-50 passengers per flight, and I suspect the rate of passengers bothering to actually write is well under 1%.

You've written no more than 3 complaints in the last year? How many this year?

I would so no more than 3 this year. Now I do ask the wise folks of FT their opinions of a complaint but most often than not I don't follow through and complain to the airline.

I'm curious how many have you written.

They don't care....plain and simple

1, regarding the downgrade of the phone system. I feel that the level of communication has suffered a lot and the waiting time for the prompts and to get to a live person is far too long. I didn't get a boilerplate answer, more like an explanation on how the new system works, but it certainly didn't improve the situation. I tend to pick and choose what is worth a complaint and go from there. Most of mine experiences on AA have been good, a few that are excellent and a few that are bad. I don't have a high level of expectation. However, when I see an AA agent do something that is above and beyond others, that is when I comment on it. I rather praise the good, and dissect the really bad.

Why not just keep your bags when leaving TBIT, walk them over to AA and check them in there?