Call Center Wait Times
 

I had the misfortune of calling reservations today regarding an upcoming schedule change. 1PM, total wait time 54 minutes.

For the last two years the call center was suppose to improve.

I find 54 minutes on a Saturday unacceptable. No weather issues. What's the excuse? The CSR informed me they were "very busy". 54 minutes reminded me of the summer of 2008.

Frontier is doing an excellent job of keeping me on the C concourse.

Ugh, it's frustrating. Especially since one of the reasons I've had to call is due to a 2 minute schedule change. A couple of weeks ago I had to call, waited for 30+ minutes, started fixing the problem with my reservation, then was disconnected. Though to agent did finish up fixing my reservation which was a ^, I didn't realize that until after I spent another 30+ min on hold.

They closed a reservation center in New Mexico and are opening a new one in Milwaukee, but it's probably not open yet.

The call center agents are in there new place in our Milwaukee hangar, also they're finishing up the call center move in Denver. I think the main problem with the wait times is the way schedule changes are handled, the communications are usually sent out around the same time. Meaning that everyone calls in at the same time. So when everyone is is trying to call in about their schedule change, so is everyone else, leading to long wait times.

We are currently in the process of helping to reduce wait times by improving the schedule change process. However this may take a couple of months. Remember we're still merging and working on the high level technology issues. Thank you for holding in there!

Hopefully we can see this feature make it to the website one day! I'm sure you also see a ton of people calling because of the confusion between the different airlines/technology platform. Hopefully we'll see improvement over the next couple of months.

These wait times have been around for the past few years. I've posted on the same subject several times in the past.

I never received any communication about the change, I discovered it by checking on my reservation at the website. The post about everyone being notified at once just isn't factual.

P.S. Seat assignments being lost in the transition, is another point of contention. That's a Whole Different Animal, for another thread.

My experience is somewhat different. I have two separate reservations for later this fall.

(a) I received e-mail notifications (both on the same day) of a schedule change on both of them.

(b) When I logged into my account, both reservations were locked and I was unable to access or change them. I would need to call to access them.

(c) I checked the seat maps for flights on both trips, and the seats I had reserved earlier were showing as available.

(d) About a week later I checked again, both reservations were once again available for online access, and my seat assignments had been restored.

(e) Checking seatmaps again, now the seats I had pre-selected are indeed shown as occupied (by me)

So...you may want to hold off and see if the same thing happens to you. What's unfortunate is that there's inconsistancy and uncertainty. If there's a special circumstance like you very much want an aisle up front, by waiting you run some risk that your preferred seats might be snapped up by someone else. My trips are to Raleigh and DC later this fall, and there's not much danger that the seats will fill up in the near term on either.

It is 8/15/2010 and it is now 2:26pm CST. I have been on hold for 80 minutes and 30 seconds for an existing reservation.

This is 100% unacceptable for any airline, seriously.

Pathetic.

Welcome to the new Frontier. Really, not any different than the old Midwest. Take a look at the competition. I've never seen such horrendous customer service.

The only way to teach Frontier a lesson is to take your business somewhere else.

I think we've been VERY patient with some of these issues. I want to remain a Frontier customer but my time is valuable too! Flying is somewhat stressful to begin with and then you add in all this uncertainty with F9, it's getting harder to stay loyal.

My loyalty left in Summer 2008, when the cutbacks began.

What's up with the cookie comments then? If you arent going to board a Frontier plane, why do you care if the cookies are served warm or not? And by the comment above I would gather that you havent tried them cold and therefor cannot truly appreciate what that brings to the flying experience (positively or negatively)

Those cookies were never intended to be served cold. When the cookie service began in the Midwest Express days, they were always served warm.

Warmed on board, not baked on board. The warming also wafted an odor of chocolate throughout the cabin. If they are going to serve cookies, serve them they way the were designed to be served.

Until Frontier can clean up its act, I'll be much happier flying the competition. 54-80 minute wait times aren't going to win over any customers.

I called today @ 6pm and had a 25 minute wait time. No big deal since I was at work and I had the extra time. Kinda crappy if you were stuck with a dying cell phone

For someone who keeps saying that Frontier keeps them on the C concourse, you seem to have lots of flights booked with the airline. Just saying....

Two things.

(1) These are not the same cookies which were served originally. Back in the old Midwest Express days, more than once I was on a flight with inoperative ovens, and that meant no cookies warm nor cold. These new are designed to be served either warmed or not warmed. More than a year ago they tested these, and they were described internally as "the cookie of the future" which could be served either way.

(2) Hanging your hat on, essentially, "that's how they originally intended, and so anything different is unacceptable" is just not realistic. Many things changed over the years with the original Midwest Express through the 80's and 90's.

As for the history of the cookies themselves, Midwest Express pre-dates them -- they were not a day-one item. For many years they were not on all flights after 10:00am, but were only served as dessert on flights where lunch was served, not on dinner flights nor on shorter snack flights like CLE-MKE. And in the early years they were smaller, messier things served from a passed basket. Later, when they introduced the FRJ, they had a notiorius problem getting the cookies "right" for quite a while.

Are the warmed ones better? You bet they are. Will all mainline flights have warmed cookies? That's the plan. Would it be better, overall, to not have cookies at all if they are not warmed? Not by a long shot.

22 minutes at 3:30 this afternoon.

Delta's little Frankenstein monster.

Fortunately, all but one of those flights are award travel. Once those are gone, I'll happily return to the C concourse.

The only reason we bought tickets was a $50.00 service recovery voucher.

The customer service experience on C is so much better. The Best Care in the Air should begin with the Best Care on the ground.

Call Center wait times fail miserably

It's a whole different animal now...Midwest is done, along with their old advertising slogans.

It certainly is a Whole Different Animal, gone from bad to worse.

IIRC, when Bedford made the branding announcement, two things would remain, The Best Care in the Air, and The cookies.

Can you really say with a straight face that things have gone from "bad to worse?"

Besides the issues with the call center (which certainly is a problem and does need to be addressed) many things have improved from a customer standpoint since Republic began consolidating Midwest/Frontier. They include restored destinations, increased flight options, enhanced frequent flier benefits, better catering, in-flight entertainment, etc.

As a side note, the issues you are experiencing with the call center were occurring prior to the cutbacks in 2008. I remember one particular time back in 2006 when I waited over two hours to speak with an agent. This was during the summer when there were no major disruptions due to weather or schedule changes.

Yep. Call Center wait times have always been an issue. One reason I always went through Fox World Travel when booking on YX then. Bypass the call centers particularly during irrops.

I have noticed that http://twitter.com/midwestairlines and http://twitter.com/flyfrontier very often provide timely assistance. The only problem is that it appears they do not monitor Twitter all of the time. It's too bad that more effort is not placed into handling immediate concerns this way, as many other carriers are now attempting.

Apparently, Frontier/formerly Midwest does not think the call center problem is serious enough to warrant any kind of changes.

Customer service really needs to be given a higher priority.

Not to mention, the disappearing seat assignment issue when finally reaching an agent regarding your schedule change.

As Blue mentioned, the call center was always a problem. It hit rock bottom in 2008. It's now 2010, with a new owner, and it is reminiscent of 2008.

I welcomed Frontier with open arms, and was hoping for more from them.

Unfortunately, the response is just the opposite.

You wouldn't want me to say more worse? Would you Blue?

As you well know, I've always respected your input and considered you to be among the most reliable contributors to FT.

You've been out of the Midwest "loop" for several months now, due to your impending departure. Those of us having to deal with the call center in the past weeks can better realize just how bad it is getting.

It's certainly not getting any better, one of the things I had been hoping for.

As long as I am on this soapbox, that reminds me of one thing an agent suggested I do with regard to my reservation "check with Frontier". By the time I heard that, my blood was already boiling.

I'm not trying to diminish the problems you and others have experienced the last few years. My blood would probably be boiling too if I had to deal with all of the problems that have occurred in recent years. Fortunately, I was not adversely impacted by the nightmare caused by the flight reductions in 2008 and the on-going issues with the call center.

Part of the problem with the call center has less to do with staffing levels and more to do with the constant schedule changes Frontier makes. I actually brought this problem up with someone from Midwest the day the brand announcement was made and was assured that steps were being taken regarding how schedule changes are handled. The goal was to ensure that no action would be needed on the part of the customer when minor tweaking is done (such as when a departure time is changes by 5 minutes). Obviously this is not happening and there's really no good excuse for why steps haven't been taken to address this problem.

The point I was trying to make was that that Republic purchased an airline that was on life support and has done a decent job in improving the customer experience when you consider all factors. There's still significant work that needs to be done but things have certainly improved since last summer.

No Wait at AirTran
 

I had the opportunity to call AirTran yesterday, regarding an upcoming reservation.

After going through the prompts, I was connected directly with a CSR. No wait involved.

Will Frontier ever be able to deliver this level of Customer Service?

Was this the elite line or the regular customer service number?

Regular number, 800-AirTran. I wouldn't consider a Friday at 6PM off peak either.

Maybe not as off peak as 2 a.m Sunday, but still off peak for all intents. A fair comparison would be, say, 11 a.m. Wednesday.

Which is less peak? 1:00 PM on Saturday, or 6:00 PM on Friday?

give it a break, is Frontier perfect no, would it be nice if the wait times improve absolutely, but frankly if you have such an ax to grind with RAH and the airline formerly known as Midwest you have made you point. Please move on and let those are us who are still willing to have Frontier win over our loyalty do it without your biased opinion.

Welcome to FT, DC!

To get a feel for what wait times are actually like, I placed 1-3 calls each day at various times to the Midwest reservations number for the past two weeks. In a few cases I held on to see how long the wait time really was, and in other cases I simply noted the estimated wait time. In the cases where I hung on, they were within 3 minutes either direction of the estimated time, so the estimate they offer seems reasonably accurate.

This is obviously just a small sample of all possible call times, and the times chosen were largely based on when I had a chance to call and thought of doing so...not scientifically random. But here's what I found.

date …….... time ……. min ….. day
18-Aug ….. 13:00 ….. 12 ….. Wednesday
18-Aug ….. 16:50 ….. 24 ….. Wednesday
19-Aug ….. 13:57 ….. 19 ….. Thursday
19-Aug ….. 16:54 ….. 20 ….. Thursday
20-Aug ….. 11:05 ….. 46 ….. Friday
20-Aug ….. 14:30 ….. 35 ….. Friday
20-Aug ….. 16:23 ….. 25 ….. Friday
21-Aug ….. 10:20 ….. 21 ….. Saturday
22-Aug ….. 17:55 ….. 24 ….. Sunday
23-Aug ….. 07:05 ….. 00 ….. Monday
23-Aug ….. 10:50 ….. 21 ….. Monday
23-Aug ….. 15:54 ….. 47 ….. Monday
24-Aug ….. 12:55 ….. 15 ….. Tuesday
25-Aug ….. 10:20 ….. 17 ….. Wednesday
25-Aug ….. 19:45 ….. 28 ….. Wednesday
26-Aug ….. 15:34 ….. 09 ….. Thursday
26-Aug ….. 17:14 ….. 25 ….. Thursday
27-Aug ….. 12:51 ….. 07 ….. Friday
27-Aug ….. 17:27 ….. 04 ….. Friday
28-Aug ….. 17:20 ….. 29 ….. Saturday
29-Aug ….. 14:45 ….. 07 ….. Sunday
30-Aug ….. 09:52 ….. 26 ….. Monday
30-Aug ….. 15:03 ….. 15 ….. Monday
30-Aug ….. 21:47 ….. 37 ….. Monday
30-Aug ….. 08:17 ….. 10 ….. Tuesday

Only once did I have zero wait, but both the average and median times were 20 minutes. Not necessarily anything to be proud of, but not consistantly disasterous, either.

I did happen to call twice on the afternoon of Friday 8/27, a date brought up in an earlier post, and the wait time was 7 minutes and 4 minutes. Apparently not a peak time at least for Midwest call center demand.

A few days ago it dawned on me that I was calling the Midwest number, not the Frontier number, and the teams are not yet integrated. So for the last five calls I hung up and called the Frontier number. Wait times in all five cases was less than fifteen seconds, and that includes last night when the estimated Midwest time was 37 minutes.

So....this all suggests a few things.

(a) Although the wait times for Midwest are not anything to brag about (and anecdotally haven't been for many years) neither are they always 30-60+ minutes.

(b) Painting the Frontier wait times as awful because of a long wait experienced when calling the Midwest line is off the mark.

(c) Because the Frontier wait times appear to be so much sorter, when the systems are integrated there should be a great deal of improvement.

(d) Because the two platforms are still separate, and it's likely that Frontier people are not being trained on the legacy Midwest platform, the pool of people to work the Midwest calls is small.

The Midwest wait times probably won't improve until everything is in the Frontier realm. When everything is moved to a single platform, there will likely be fallout which keeps the Frontier call center busier than normal for awhile, plus the former Midwest res agents will still be new to the system. But if recent experience with true Frontier wait times is any indication, there will be a marked difference when the integration has passed.

As usual, excellent analysis Knope.Thanks for taking the time. Time will tell if the wait times really do improve.