ICC - "The computer system is down"
 

Okay, I know it's a nitpick, but I just called the ICC about one of my itineraries and got the answer, "I'm sorry, sir, our computer systems are completely down. I can't help you", to which I replied, "Really, UA's entire reservation system is down and you can't look at my itinerary?" The agent, responded, quite nicely, "Yes, you'll have to call back later and see if the systems are up again."

Jesus, I wish I was 1K.

Wouldn't UA grind to a halt if the entire reservation system was down?

If you can't see a reservation, yep.

There are lots of power problems in southern India recently. I know in BLR, due to not much rain (most of India's power comes from hydro plants), electricity is limited. Several power outages recently. I bet that brought their local systems down. I doubt UA's main reservation system is down.

Yes, it is not good having to be served only by ICC.

I suspect that you are right, and that is kind of what I was alluding to. I'm always a little irritated that you have to fly 100K miles a year to get the benefits of real customer service, but that subject's been covered about a million times on these posts already. I'll get off my soapbox now

This happened to my college within the last couple of weeks. The rep told him “I see nothing” which he managed to decipher was a power outage of some sort. He ended up making reservations with that MD80 saturated carrier.

Get pretty good customer service at 50K miles a year too. As many others say...hang up and call again.

Can confirm 1K line no problem's! But then again it was someone in Honolulu not India who picked up, but the automated voice system was not even active, the agent picked up on the 1st ring!

In the interest of fairness I have to report that I did indeed call back a little while later and got a very helpful agent who was able to confirm an upgrade for me. Luck of the draw, I guess.

So don't they have battery backup and a generator at their call centers? Short of getting hit by a meteor I can see no reason why the system that drives revenue should be down due to power, pathetic.

Looks like it wasn't a big college if MD80 was big enough. ;)

I would tell them
"Can you call up your tech support and see if they can fix it?" :)

Why call, wouldn't they be in the next cube?

Sigh. This happens everytime the hamster dies. They'll have a new one on the wheel in a few hours.

if they are seeing regular problems due to this, the center they are using is low rent and frankly, not worth using.

There are some excellent call centers in India that really take pride in their english, work, and ability, however they aren't much cheaper than US call centers because of the large pay raises required to keep such a trained staff in India (think 20% a year raises guaranteed for starters, and that goes up after a year normally!) add to that the falling value of the dollar and it makes for a very substantial hit to US companies using them.

However that being said even most of the low end call centers have continuous running UPS systems that can normally handle the load for hours without even a genset running, if they are having such outages on a regular basis I'd hate to see what they are using for their call center.

I dont think they have room at the call center to house the UPS systems.