IAMORGAN

dddc

The crux of this seems to be many customers want multiple ways of accessing contact centre staff, but those staff are limited in number and can only work on a finite number of issues at a time. Does someone waiting on the phone have higher priority than someone waiting on webchat, or someone who agreed to be called back 30 to 40 minutes later which was now due? Do you split the support teams into GGL down to Blue and non-blue, but then that means some GGL may wait longer than some others, or if you don't, then some non-blue passengers may never get a call back or attention.

What we're seeing here is an event that BA's IT risk management team have said is rare enough not to warrant additional spend on a solution - or if they presented it to the main board as a risk, something the C-suite staff thought not worth spending the money on. Hopefully they will revisit this and weigh up the perceived loss of goodwill and business against the cost of implementing some changes. But regardless of what ever IT solution they come up with to sort out priority call answering, if they don't have enough contact centre staff to deal with the issue, there's not much point. Maybe this is where they train all BA Waterworld staff in the fine art of reservations and how to make changes.

beachmouse

Though the problem with that is that the best rebooking option often involves invoking powers that the airline has good reasons to not grant to the passenger. I've had a large hub ground stop recovery routing where the quickest way for the GA to get me onto the best possible partner flight option involved changing my ticket from the cheapest possible economy fare bucket to an unrestricted fully refundable Y ticket in order to force partner availability on a different airline. Which required a short conversation with a supervisor at some sort of partner airlines reissued tickets desk to get that kind of override.

IMO, better to focus on the easy part of the rebooking process- the 80-90% of flyers trying to do something like trying to get on the 11:15 flight because they're going to misconnect on the 10:30 flight. Given the option, most people would rather spend 2-3 minutes on their smartphone pushing a few buttons to deal with that kind of thing. And that would free up more phone agents for the kind of harder and complex cases where the fix involves some sort of legit need to do a manual override to correct a problem

Paren

Agreed with the OP and I've also made some similar suggestions here: BA : We're sorry, but our lines are busy...

pennineuk

Often1

AA not only identifies status based on phone number (or permits one to enter one's AA # if the phone is not registered), but the call is routed accordingly and the agent immediately asks whether one is calling about the next itinerary. If not, a simple request for the PRN and that is pulled up.

The reality is that many of the problems are caused by poor IT which requires passengers to call to accomplish tasks which should be handled online. There will always be people who choose to call, but that number dwindles every year. The less routine the call centers handle, the more time to focus on complex issues.

Kgmm77

RG1X

I genuinely wouldn't have cared if it took BA 12 hours to call me back, as long as I'd have known a callback was coming (could have easily had a page showing where I was in a queue and estimated wait time).

They really need to invest some money (ha!) to stop anything like this happening again in the future.

Often1

Data protection ought to be automated as well. While there may be rare occasions when there is no option, for the most part, alpha-numeric data ought to be entered into a keypad on a mobile (or land line) rather than bellowed into a phone in a public place.

Crampedin13A

Agreed. If even Air Canada can and does do this and actually call back when they promised for a non status pax like me it is time BA started to do some investing for at least the GGL and Gold lines

abligh

BA could also ask you to enter your exec club number (if not recognised from the phone number), passport number, DoB and digits from postcode while waiting. This would speed things up too as less agent time would be spent doing what a computer could do.

our_kid