Xyzzy

I find that they always tell me their name when they answer, befre even get a chance to speak. I also find the SLC agents to be among the best.

chewy3

I can tell you that in SABRE just viewing a reservation is not logged in the history so what the supervisor told you is likely correct in SHARES as well.

MatthewLAX

The ex-Cons usually answer "United Premier Line" instead of "1K desk".

Other than picking up on Hawaiian and Chicago accents, the only other sure thing is when an agent says, "Thank you for calling United Airlines this is Ms. so and so."

DTW!

kenn0223

In many cases it's preferable to NOT have a recording or audit trail. I would expect that UA, like most companies, only keeps records they are legally obligated to keep or are necessary to run their business. Having superfluous records rarely works to a company's advantage.

bocastephen

This is incorrect. 12 years ago, which is 1,000 technical years ago, I helped administer a system from now defunct Witness Systems at Amex - not only did we record *every* phone call, but we scraped everyone's screen and keyboard entries on top of that. The technology is there today to record every keystroke, screen shot and phone call in real time, and storage today is less than 1/100th what is cost 12 years ago, if that.

Whether UA uses such a system, I cannot answer - but they most certainly should.


Sabre and Shares are not related - Apollo and Shares are related, and you can trace (in Apollo) which pseudo-city and login accessed a reservation because once it's opened, you either need to receive and end it, or ignore it - both leave a fingerprint.

This behavior by the agent was rude and unprofessional - and while another FT'r pointed out my policy is wrong, I still stand by my method of screening each airline agent by their gender, tone of voice and communications clarity within the first sentence - and if I have any doubts, I say thank you and I'll call back. I'm 80%+ at bracketing my calls to find an agent who is willing and able to help me with almost anything. It is very easy to sense impatience or frustration in someone's voice over the phone - and you pick up that vibe after hello, don't bother continuing the call.

SunLover

My fresh in my mind because it happened this month/incompetent agent/regarding a reward ticket experience:

I called the 1K line to change an existing reward reservation. The reason I chose to change an existing PRN was I have been chided by agents in the past for starting a whole new PRN, then canceling the old reservation. OK; I will try it your way.

The agent was clearly uncomfortable with the process. She told me the new segments were not available (which was not true, I checked in advance of calling) so I told her forget the change I will keep what I had. Well...

** Additional miles were deducted from my account
** Additional taxes were charged to my credit card
** My existing reservation was altered and I was missing a segment

I noticed the miles deducted SNAFU first and called right away and had those credited back. When I noticed a few days later my credit card was charged erroneously I called the 1K line again and got a very helpful agent who audibly gasped when she reviewed the train wreck of a record. I am still waiting for that refund, but will give it a few more days.

My lessons learned:
1) If you have enough miles in your account and the routing are different enough - create a whole new PRN for reward travel, wait a few days, and then cancel the existing PRN.

2) I can tell from almost the time they pick up the phone who is going to be a competent and helpful agent and who is not. If you get a whiff of hesitance or incompetence end the call politely and call back in a few minutes. On that note - I have had my best luck calling the 1K line weekdays during normal business hours.


Agreed. I alway write down their name and refer to the agent by name during the call.



SunLover

uastarflyer

2 weeks ago an agent transferred me onto MP service center while she stayed on the call. The MP service center agent very abruptly hung up on me after answering a question, not allowing me the chance at a follow up.

The premier agent called me back to apologize for that treatment. Kudos.

kenn0223

I wasn't saying that such systems did not exist nor that there weren't companies that used them. I was pointing out the weekly data is measured in TB and not GB and that there is additional database serving, bandwidth, and manpower than goes into running such a system. My point was the scope of a "record every call" system is not inmaterial and I was guessing that UA has not chosen to make such an investment.

chewy3

I never claimed the systems were related, just that it's possible the supervisor was telling the truth. I can't claim first-hand knowledge of the SHARES system which is why I said 'likely' and not for sure. If one common GDS does not record this information then it follows that another system might not either.

Jorgen

This is United Airlines we're talking about. They probably use a D-battery powered casette tape recorder, connected to the switchboard via two tin cans and a piece of string.

serfty

Maybe my USB example was too small and even with that, 1Tb per day is nothing in a corporate sense.

I highly doubt 10% of 400K pax call every day for 5 minutes. I'd guess more like 2% of PAX for that maybe 5 minutes average. Also, 32K sampling would be more than adequate for telephone conversations. That brings it down to 250Gb.

Most of the processing is automatic - it's only those tine percentage of cases where it would be required and a company with such a customer base as a major airline would have rocks in their head if they did not utilise what is these days pretty standard.

The best way to know how much to record would be to know how many agents are employed and for how many hours.

Often1

There is a limited value and a huge cost involve. The value is that neither the CSR nor the customer knows whether the call is actually recorded so needs to presume that it is. The cost is that calls need not only be recorded, but files created so that the recordings can be tracked.

A rude agent is either rude just once in his career so it doesn't matter in the big picture or he's routinely rude in which case he'll get bagged either through a complaint or a routine review of his work.

sinoflyer

There is the "supervisor," and there is the supervisor.

The "supervisor" is a customer service agent who is trained to handle more reservations-related responsibilities and has access to do more things to a PNR. They do not supervise phone agents in ways that I think many of us expect them to. Some "supervisors" may even earn less than regular agents if their seniorities differ significantly. "Supervisors" see pretty much the same information on a PNR as phone agents do. When no change is made to a PNR, nothing is recorded no matter how many times it has been opened and viewed. When we call and ask to speak to the supervisor, we get connected to the "supervisor."

The supervisor is a management level position. Each reservations office has several of them; they supervise the "supervisors" and regular agents. They cannot take phone calls, so you will never talk to them. They can listen in on calls either live or recorded, and they can also trace back a call by using phone logs and key stroke recordings. Rules may have changed, but the supervisor must go through a list of bureaucratic procedures before they could initiate a search of those recordings, the least of which is a complaint about the phone agent. Since a "supervisor" has no idea who took OP's call, there is no trail to even begin with.

In any event, if the supervisor was not listening live when the agent hung up on OP, consider it water under the bridge.

Steve M

It's certainly required by HIPAA in the healthcare field to log every time a record is viewed when electronic medical records are involved. That's the only way to discourage and catch "prying eyes" that like to snoop on others' medical information without a legitimate purpose. Anyone that works in a hospital environment is used to this sort of logging of everything they do.

Another field where this is done routinely, and has been for at least a couple of decades, is law enforcement. Every retrieval of any sort of criminal history, driver license information, etc., is logged with the agency number and ID or badge number of the requester. It's done for the same reason as in healthcare: it's the only effective way to prevent nosy people that happen to have access to the data from just browsing around as they see fit, and/or an insider making confidential information available for a price.

So, it's well within the capability of a large IT system to do such logging. As someone else pointed out, in an industry where such logging is not required by law, is it in the business interest of the company to do so? Part of this is determining whether the additional cost is worth the benefit.

Steve M

You're off by a factor of 10 on the high side. First of all, assuming you don't have a need to keep both directions of the call separate, the raw audio from the phone company is only 64kbps, so that's the most it could possibly be to store it even if you did no compression. And, you can somewhat easily get it down to around 9.6kbps with the right codec and still be able to clearly hear what was said.

So, all other things being equal, the storage requirements based on your assumptions go down to 100MB/day.