dparkinson

In he next few months, agents will begin working from home. This includes web support people working there. Shame, I know some people don't like them, but they're some of the most competent agents in the system when you get a good one.

chitownflyer

A sCO rep informed me during a call that there is a move to get more reservations and Mileage Plus agents working from home. On the plus side, there is no commute, but sometimes it is good to have coworkers whom can assist with customer service issues.

MatthewLAX

This can still happen through messaging and essentially SHARES-style SMS. Not quite as good as face-to-face, but effective.

EWR764

If the agents are being offered the opportunity to work from home, then I applaud that as it is far preferable to a simple termination and travelers will continue to benefit from the institutional knowledge and capability of the existing staff.

nunusguy

Surely a very large majority of the employees would prefer working from home, of course that assumes they are retained by United ?

channa

SLC was, by far, the best of the legacy CO call centers.

So it's not surprising to see this closing in the airline's quest for mediocrity.

Like on time, perhaps there are diminishing returns in customer sat. scores that are too high.

fastair

It does, but it incurs a pay cut of about $4.00/hr when at max scale.

MatthewLAX

Then HNL would have closed long ago.

I do like SLC agents, generally.

channa

There could be other factors at play (e.g., leases, tax arrangements with the state, etc.). In due time, my friend. In due time.

I'm personally not a fan of UA's HNL call center like many folks around here -- I find the service to be hit or miss.

But CO SLC was always solid, IME.

halls120

Concur - I was connected once to a TPA area CSR who was working from home. He had an issue, and was able to use an internal system to get the answer he needed. I asked him if he liked working from home, and he said he did, for the most part. He said he missed the camaraderie of the workplace and interactions with his co-workers.

dank0014

If they are truly moving more agents to work at home, this could be a good thing for the consumer - if UA does it right.

They can then move to a capacity demand model. In current state, they probably staff the call centers based upon previous year trends and call volumes. What that means though is when IRROPs hits, the call centers get nailed hard and long wait times.

If they move to a work at home model, they could leverage a demand queue where as volumes spike, they can message their employees at home to quickly sign on for 1-2 hours if they are available. Even getting 30-35 agents on for a short period (limited cost to the employee since they can just sign on for a short period without having to get ready for work), could help drive wait times down and avoid a ripple affect.

Would be interesting to see if UA actually leverages this right. I consulted with a company about two years ago to implement and they used to see on average about 45-60 second wait times during normal periods peak at 20-30 minutes during high demand periods, like outages, (which last usually only a short time) to drop to 1-2 minutes during those demands.

halls120

Given that all management cares about is cutting costs, I'm not optimistic they will.

dank0014

Then they just have a blind eye. Given a rough guess based upon the number of agents they have, they would easily see a $5-8 million savings if implemented correctly.

Then again, I know we are dealing with a leadership team that may not be the sharpest crayons in the box

channa

LOL. 30 agents for an hour at 20 minutes per call for SHARES rebooking times, is only 90 customers helped...less than a single A319 full of misconnects. ...and that's assuming they don't need the Helpdesk, in which case it's 2 agents for 20 minutes for a single rebook. LOL

They need hundreds, if not thousands of agents on standby to make a dent with these lousy CO computers.

fastair

I don't know if these number are accurate, but someone threw out a number of about 130-140 agents being displaced between the SLC, RAP closures along with a limited number of people being "downsized" at the other remaining res centers. I'm not sure if this is positions lost, or just displacement to home (and also not sure if the number is accurate as that number seems very low for closures to me. Perhaps it's because the only res center I know is CHI and that is a very large facility, it's possible these other two are smaller.)