Adam Smith

Can anyone explain to me why WS publishes on its website, and tells you at the beginning of a call, hold times that are patently false?

I want to make a same-day change to a flight departing today. Last night, the WS website was quoting about 41-43 minutes when I phoned in and similar from the automated voice on the phone. I refreshed the website periodically and the time was fairly consistent until a brief jump to around 60 minutes (after I had been only hold ~1h50).

It was almost exactly 2 hours before my call was answered.

Of course, after about 1h15 of hold time last night, the seats I wanted were still available, but were gone by the time I actually got on with an agent.

Seats have opened up now on another earlier flight, so I'm trying once again to make the change. WS website has been consistently quoting ~21 minutes and the automated phone system quoted me 18-27 minutes.

It took 60 minutes before an agent answered my call this time. And, of course, the seats that had been there after about 50 minutes of hold time were gone when I finally go through.

What is the point of giving these customers these hold times that are clearly completely and totally false? I'm aware that there have been massive IRROPs since yesterday due to freezing rain at YYZ, but that's no excuse for publishing wait times that have no basis in fact - waiting approximately 3x the quoted wait time is absolutely unacceptable. Either make the estimate correct (within some reasonable margin of error), or don't publish one.

Sunny Day

I think the massive cancellations overwhelmed their staff (same for AC). As WJ Gold, I have a dedicated line which helps a lot and I am happy with. All the rebooking calls take a long time so the estimate are not as reliable. I would imagine AC would be the same but as SE you get a dedicated line.

Adam Smith

Not really relevant. The hold time is going to be longer during a day with bad IRROPs, but they have hard data that calls are taking X time to answer based on the amount of time that people have been spending on hold. To publish an estimated wait time that's roughly 1/3 of X means that either they're being deliberately misleading or the system is totally useless because it's not tied to real-world data. Both scenarios reflect poorly on WS.
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I wasn't complaining about the absolute level of the wait times, I was complaining about WS's misleading information regarding the wait times. I know that I'm a FOTSG to WS and that as a result my calls have no special priority.

mahasamatman

To placate the masses. No company can possibly predict accurate hold times because they have no idea how long people will actually be on the phone. They use historical data, which is a WAG at best.

Adam Smith

How do wait times 3x longer than advertised placate anyone? It only makes people more frustrated to wait far longer than they expect.

As for inability to predict wait times, hogwash. There are hundreds or thousands of calls when the lines are backed up like that. Those callers are generating data as they sit on hold. Not being able to predict down to the second or the precise minute, absolutely. But when your lines are jammed with people who have been on hold already for nearly two hours, there's no way that your throughput is going to increase so massively that a new caller is going to get through in 40 minutes. Throughput is not that variable or unpredictable. IRROPs calls may take longer, but WS still has data on tens or hundreds of thosands of those calls every year.

Sopwith

Actually, what is untrue is the consistent and disingenuous use of the phrase, “Due to unusually heavy call volume...”. During IRROPS heavy call volume is not unusual at all. They knew for three days that an ice storm was coming, and the truth is that not one of them had the intellect to call in enough agents to work the call volume they knew was coming.

Just like AC ...

Adam Smith

I don't remember what the message said this morning, but last night, the message actually said something along the lines of "Due to bad weather in parts of Eastern Canada, our call centre is experiencing extremely high call volumes", which I found surprisingly precise and more accurate than the usual type of message, such as what you had posted.

Fiordland

For a position like this and with modern technology there should be no reason that they can't have a good number of these people working from home.

Sopwith

"...and we haven't called enough agents in to work to deal with it."

cedric

How many agents do you expect WestJet and other airlines to have on standby? Are you prepared to pay an additional cost on each ticket so that they can hire, train, equip and retain those resources? So that you don't have to wait a little while on hold during bad weather?

yul36

They should have enough employed, or on stand by so the "guest" does not have to wait an hour. Espy where there is a storm not impending but actually happening, that will affect a good chunk of their network. OP is bang on.

dodgy

They should have robust enough technology via online methods (web/app) that you should’t need to call in.

Sopwith

1. Enough to do the job properly.
2. Yes.
3. If it was only a “little while” it wouldn’t be an issue. The issue is the big while.

What is a reasonable industry metric for phone service? As an overall average I don’t think 90% answered within 15 minutes is unreasonable. During IRROPS I could live with 90% within 30 minutes. BUT...they need to tell you at the beginning how long it will be. If I’m told (accurately) that the wait will be xx minutes I can decide whether I want to wait or not. When I get slam dunked onto hold with no indication of how long it will be, I will admit to having a short fuse.

cedric

This I agree with.

Adam Smith

Regardless of how many agents they have working or how long it takes, the original subject of this thread wasn't the length of the wait time, but WS's extremely deceptive published wait time, which was only 1/3 of the actual wait time.

Yes. Sadly, they don't.