airmanofthequeen

Somewhat shocked by the service on the silver line today. I booked LHR-NRT via HEL return today on the BA website. First and last sectors are BA flight numbers operated by Finnair and longhauls are JAL numbered and operated. Seat selection was not available online either in MMB or on Finnair website so I called the silver line. The agent did reserve seats on Finnair but then told me they had been deleted and I would need to contact Finnair and then JAL. When I asked him how to contact Finnair his suggestion was that I should google their number!

Surely if his system didn't show the number to call at another One World airline, basic customer service would suggest that he could find it out for the customer (maybe by googling it...).

Is this a helpline or a wind-up line?

LondonCanuck

Shocking... that would never happen on the Bronze line :-)

Good solution, but maybe CS have to work some on their delivery... personally, I find Google is best and fastest

T8191

Jest, having seen you profile ...

Try calling BZN for a bit of assistance

rossmacd

I think this is the best answer from the agent - rather than him wasting time finding and reciting a number back to you, he can get on and help another customer who is no doubt been on hold. It takes all of 5 seconds to google this information.

No wonder the call centre queues are long if people are expecting BA agents to be the Yellow Pages

simons1

If it only takes 5 seconds then surely a professional approach would be to say 'hang on 5 seconds and I'll give you the number'.

Rather than ending the call and leaving the customer to go online and find out something that I would expect someone semi proficient in OneWorld matters to know.

Anonba

Deleted

rossmacd

Yes, but it takes longer than 5 seconds to convey the number to the customer. It may take the customer more time to find a pen/paper, receive the number then potentially have the number re-confirmed back to them. I'd rather the lazy amongst us use Google for this type of query so other customers can get through to talk to agents about something that cannot be done online.

JAXBA

Quote:

Originally Posted by simons1

If it only takes 5 seconds then surely a professional approach would be to say 'hang on 5 seconds and I'll give you the number'.

Rather than ending the call and leaving the customer to go online and find out something that I would expect someone semi proficient in OneWorld matters to know.

It could have been phrased better, something along the lines of "I can look that up for you but it may take a minute; you might be able to find it faster than me on Google…"

@Anonba do BA agents have internet access now? JAX agents didn't; they could only get to other airline websites and BBC News...

UKtravelbear

No doubt the operator could see on a clock how long the call had aready been and the number of other calls waiting and dropped calls and a supervisor monitoring his performance on call length and numbers answered etc etc

Perhaps the next time someone complains about the length of time it takes a call to be answered they can be pointed to this thread as an example of why!

airmanofthequeen

Wow. First time I've been called that online!

Maybe you think it was unreasonable to expect assistance from the assistance line. I don't. The call was answered in a very short period so the five, ten, eleven seconds it would have taken to provide a bit of service wouldn't have kept too many folk waiting as the queue didn't seem massive. I hadn't called just to get them to give me the number.

NWIFlyer

The point, surely, is that this is a BA assistance line, not a oneworld one. The individual airlines may well have a massive amount of potential numbers to call throughout the world which could also be dependant on status level, on top of which there may well be website chat options. I wouldn’t remotely expect a BA line to have all of that information at their fingertips, so if I was told to contact another airline I’d expect to go to their website and find an appropriate method of getting hold of them myself.

BA will, I’m sure, transfer some more complex calls to codeshare partners - I’ve been put through to AA by the Gold line with a query no-one at BA could resolve and which needed a high level agent - but for simple things such as seat assignments that simply doesn’t make sense.

Anonba

Wow considering you dont work for BA you imagined a lot of presure that isnt there lol.

Anonba

There are transfer numbers for joint business partners so there are only transfer numbers for American, Iberia, Finnair JAL and Qatar. For other Oneworld carriers there are no transfer numbers so we would need to go to that carriers site to look up the number.There would be nothing wrong with transferring for seats if the BA agent needed the other carriers assistance.

Anonba

Well we can use google So there would be no issues here ive been asked similiar questions and googled other airlines sites to get numbers or other info.

whiskerxx

I called the silver line today and said I was looking to try to book an avios flight
with S7.
The agent said "Whats S7?"
I said - an airline.
He said "Really? I've never heard of them" and then said "there are only seven airlines in the oneworld alliance"