I was dealing with a bot recently and going in circles with an unusual problem. It wasn’t until I kindly swore that I wanted to speak to a {redacted per forum rules} representative did it connect me

my coworkers who were sitting around me witnessing this burst out in laughter

I think we found the holy Grail to dealing with these new Bots

One of the first times I tried the chat feature one of the agents "needed a few minutes to look at this" and I missed the auto generated "are you still there?" and it dumped the entire chat and I had to start over. Since then I've made a point of inserting a polite "ping" (not worded as such) every few minutes to keep the chat from timing out. Even doing that I've had agents just ghost me mid-chat -- and always after 30+ minutes of investment (maybe it hit the end of their shift?) enough times to make the chat feature worthless IMO.

Though such stupidity is not limited to United or even B2C. Wearing my "Corporate IT" (B2B) hat I have a case open with Microsoft Azure where the rep keeps sending me "I have verified this is a bug and am waiting for more information from the team involved" and then a few days later I get a (presumably automated) "do you still need help with this issue?" To which I reply to keep the case from auto closing and the rep sends me the "I have verified this is a bug..."... How about we just don't email each other until something changes?

Text versus voice for Customer Service - dissapointed
 

I was overseas and was trying to call in to work on my itin, but the crappy Cell service kept dropping my call. So I tried the text option, What a horrible experience. It starts out in AI, I get it, the problem was that it really didn’t want to get me a person. It seems the text version is just options you can see in the app. That wasn’t very helpful.
Eventually I got to a person and they looked at the options that I was interested.

I was mainly disappointed because I was expecting a person from the start. Especially since AI text is just options you can see in the App. Plus, to be frank, as a 1K, on an INTL ITIN that included Polaris legs, I kind of expected a person faster.

Anyone else been underwhelmed with the text option?

Yes. Chat options that are AI are generally useless IMO.

It worked fine a couple of years ago when I knew I had irrops inbound and was still in the air on my way to ORD. I got through to a person right away, presented him options I'd researched, and got rebooked before I even landed in ORD instead of getting stranded overnight at IND (which was going to happen otherwise).

Last summer, I tried it again when UA was having phone issues (and I kept getting dropped when calling in). The text experience was poor to say the least. I had to wade through chat bot prompts, then it "put me in queue" to chat with a human. 35 minutes later, I got one, but in between text exchanges, it lost track of my connection and put me back with the bot. I eventually learned how to get around the phone system trying to "call me back" (it wasn't offering anything else at the time) and get through to an agent--think it was something like pressing 0 three times in a row at the various prompts. And then hoping the "all of our agents are busy" hold queue didn't drop me as it had several times.

My hypothesis is that these apps are set up to handle 80% of all questions with ease. People on this board tend not to have questions that fall into the 80% category, as why would you need help with that? The challenge isn’t that UA only solves 80% automagically, but that the app tries to jam the percentage closer to a 100. In other words, it tries to force you to pick one of their pre-defined options, which doesn’t fit.

UA/Chase credit cards are worse, btw, as when you get to a human, they are less knowledgeable than the app…

I dunno. The times I have tried text interactions, it's been for something simple, like rebooking paid flights during irrops when the app didn't work. Otherwise I would have just used the app.

Like I mentioned, as a 1K I want an agent NOW. Any magic words to put in the chat to get a person? The chat bot doesn’t speak DYKWIA….

I won’t use it again, unless I’m in the air.

I did have the APP completely fail multiple times during IRROPS…

Apping has been overall decent for me. Yes it takes about 3 steps to sidestep ai.

Far better than calling and not understanding the foreign language on the other end

I've used the app successfully once, inflight to rebook an itin for irrops that I couldn't manually do myself. A couple of other times it was useless and a waste of time. The time it did work it took me a few hours of back-and-forth with the agent, or multiple agents. Only reason I stuck with it was because I had plenty of time in the air FRA-ORD.

I don't like how if you toggle to another app, your screen times out and goes black etc it forces a re-connect which can be lengthy. Sometimes the function crashes altogether. While I see merit in having this functionality its generally more frustrating than its worth IMHO.

Also, some people may not know but the Marriott app also works inflight on the plain unitedwifi connection.