bfhu

I'm a United 1K member. I usually had good experience when I called United 1K help desk. But yesterday, I had a really bad experience. I called United 1K help desk yesterday, trying to make a change to an existing award travel for my parents. It was a male agent that I spoke to. I was actually surprised to talk to a male agent, since almost every agent I spoke to was a female. I asked him if he could help combine two one-way tickets into one round-trip ticket, so I can add a stop-over. He said no. He could not do it. Then I asked if he could add a return segment to a one way ticket. He said he could not find the available award seats for the flights on the day that I was looking for. However I was able to find the award seats on United's website. So I told him that I was able to find the award seats on United's website. Then he said "go ahead and make the changes online" and hung up.

I had never seen such a rude agent. So I called 1K help desk again and asked another agent to transfer me to a supervisor. The supervisor apologized, but was not able to help me file a complaint. She told me that United will not be able to use the call logs to trace down the agent if he has not touched my tickets.

y2k1jetta

Of course they know who handled the call. Lazy!

fastair

If he didn't change the record then there is no paper trail. Most likely he is off probation so call's probability of being monitored/recorded is close to zero.

channa

You mean they don't log who opens each record?

If that's true, that's ridiculous.

UrbaneGent

I thought any time a reservation is opened/handled it gets tagged - time/date/employee number. I have always been of the belief it doesn't matter what one does for a living, we all combine our energies to make the world go round, just as long as they do it with excellence. Hanging up on you is awful customer service. If someone is unhappy with what they are doing, go find another job that will.

UAL4life

+1


It was most likely logged- I'm pretty sure just opening it and viewing it leaves a mark.

Really really sad. There are long lines of people, good people, who would love to have that job- he and others like him should step to the side and go find a job where they can actually make a difference, instead of staying and poisoning not only the customers but their fellow employees as well.

fastair

Nope. Viewing isn't logged in the record itself, only changes. That isn't to say with enuf IT research, a transaction log, which has every keystroke by the agent in question, cannot be pulled, but that would require a "best guess" as to who, to go into that. Very labor intensive even knowing who, but not knowing who makes it multiples more labor intensive.

Jaimito Cartero

That's why I always get a name, and call center at the beginning of a call. Rarely need to use it, but I can't see it hurting.

ORDnHKG

Do you seriously need to call back and just to ask for supervisor to file a complaint ? You called the agent rude just because he is not willing to help and hung up on you ? He is far from rude, more like just being unhelpful

Not all agents are helpful and get what you need, the FT rule is just hang up and call again you will get a different agent already !

MatthewLAX

I find the ex-Cons in Houston or Salt Lake get hostile if you start the call by asking them for this info.

Hate to generalize, but if you get a white male, it is always IAH or SLC and you have a 2/3 chance of him having a bad attitude. Thursday I had a ticketing issue (reservation would not ticket) and reached a male in IAH. After rudely telling me to be patient, I insisted he take a look and he put me on hold and left me on hold...for over an hour until I hung up. He never checked in and I bet he was surfing the net or dissing me at the water cooler.

It's not like he held me captive--I always multi-task when I am on the phone with UA--but very annoying nonetheless, particularly since there was a problem with the reservation that was preventing it from ticketing that the next agent fixed.

For UA phone agents, I like my legacy UA women and Hawaiian men...

serfty

ALL calls are recorded in this day and age.ą

Moreover they can be easily indexed on date/time, incoming caller id, FF number, agent etc. and are thus easy to retrieve.

The supervisor was either incorrectly educated or trying to put the OP off.

ą Think about it, how much RAM storage and the physical size of that required to store?

A 16Gbyte USB would easily handle a weeks calls. They would be using a far more efficient setup.

dparkinson

Really? I've gotten away with MURDER from some of the SLC/IAH guys. Things, I wouldn't have, in my wildest dreams, imagined they'd approve.

kenn0223

I am not sure if you understand the scale of United's operation.

They fly nearly 400,000 passengers everyday. If 10% of those people call and each call is 5 minutes long that's over 3,300 hours of audio. I have no idea what the minium quality would need to be but at 96 kbps it's about 1TB per day; not to mention the processing & manpower required to manage that kind of database.

I highly doubt they record more than a small fraction of calls.

JeffS

Why is it ridiculous? Does your company create an audit trail every time someone views a record? We are a regulated company and I can tell you we do not.

Antipode

While I haven't gotten away with anything that I'm aware of, I've had some great experiences with SLC agents also, including male ones.