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On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

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Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#121

Post by mehrdadn »

Scoundreller wrote: post #88
kenneth wrote: post #57

The most obvious example of this in daily life is through airlines, where the difference is pretty transparent and you get night-and-day better service by being a loyal customer. With top status with AA and UA (EXP and 1K), you connected to U.S.-based very senior phone agents right away, who always make sure to take care of any issue that arises. 50min delay on your AA flight? No problem, sir, we are rebooking you on…

> The cheap seats have very low margins, oftentimes negative… so it just infeasible economically to give everyone good service. An empty seat costs the airline more than a paid ticket. They can’t exactly fly just 189/233rds of the plane.

Are you imagining fuel usage is independent of aircraft occupancy?

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#122

Post by indecisive_user »

ubernostrum wrote: post #103
Scoundreller wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The cheap seats have very low margins, oftentimes negative… so it just infeasible economically to give everyone good service. An empty seat costs the airline more than a paid ticket. They can’t exactly fly just 189/233rds of the plane.

An empty seat costs the airline more than a paid ticket. As stated, you seem to be implying that selling a ticket for 1 cent is better than flying an empty seat. But that's not guaranteed to be true. If they put someone in that seat at a ticket cost of 1 cent, does it cost more than 1 extra cent in fuel to move the now-increased weight of the aircraft? If there's a free soda or something offered, does the extra one t…

>airlines routinely fly planes that aren't full, instead of going to extreme lengths to auction off ever-cheaper tickets in hopes of getting someone in every seat on every flight.

Though I agree with your broader point, if airlines regularly auctioned off seats right before a flight it would encourage customers to wait until such time to make their ticket purchase. Even if the actioned seat still net them some profit, the overall effect could cause a psychological devaluation of regular tickets.

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#123

Post by Geekette »

kenneth wrote: post #57

The most obvious example of this in daily life is through airlines, where the difference is pretty transparent and you get night-and-day better service by being a loyal customer. With top status with AA and UA (EXP and 1K), you connected to U.S.-based very senior phone agents right away, who always make sure to take care of any issue that arises. 50min delay on your AA flight? No problem, sir, we are rebooking you on…

Except that airlines still get the bulk of their revenue from economy class. The average margin may be higher per business/1st class ticket but the bulk of total sales and profit comes from economy.

The airlines' discriminatory marketing actions are buffeted by disparate nature of their customer base (a group of strangers who'll typically never meet again after sharing a flight) as travellers don't have enough interest in and means of organizing. Otherwise, if economy class customers boycotted en masse, that airline would suffer more than if a handful of 1st class fliers did. United Airlines' scrambling after the Dr Dao debacle was driven by desire to stem the potential financial loss, not just PR crisis.

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#124

Post by mehrdadn »

atwebb wrote: post #116
mehrdadn wrote: post #91

> Zeta Global, whose clients include wireless carriers, generates scores using data points such as the number of times a customer has dialed a call center and whether that person has browsed a competitor’s website or searched certain keywords in the past few days. Wait, so this means I dial a number and they link my identity to my browser to tell whether I've browsed a competitor's website in the past few days? Is th…

That's not nearly how far it's gone, but yes, this is an implementation of it.

You mean it's gone much farther than this? Would you have any examples?

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#125

Post by Gys »

lostlogin wrote: post #97
kenneth wrote: post #57

The most obvious example of this in daily life is through airlines, where the difference is pretty transparent and you get night-and-day better service by being a loyal customer. With top status with AA and UA (EXP and 1K), you connected to U.S.-based very senior phone agents right away, who always make sure to take care of any issue that arises. 50min delay on your AA flight? No problem, sir, we are rebooking you on…

In my experiece the exact opposite is done by telecoms, insurance and banks. New customers are enticed with offers not available to existing customers, and great things are offered to them. Being a customer for decades doesn’t have rewards with that group of businesses.

The typical client of telecoms, insurance and banks probably does not change much. So ones signed up, it does not make sense to spend money on them. Airlines might be different because each flight is bought separately. You want ff to keep coming back (to stay ff).

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#126

Post by the_duke »

Scoundreller wrote: post #88
kenneth wrote: post #57

The most obvious example of this in daily life is through airlines, where the difference is pretty transparent and you get night-and-day better service by being a loyal customer. With top status with AA and UA (EXP and 1K), you connected to U.S.-based very senior phone agents right away, who always make sure to take care of any issue that arises. 50min delay on your AA flight? No problem, sir, we are rebooking you on…

> The cheap seats have very low margins, oftentimes negative… so it just infeasible economically to give everyone good service. An empty seat costs the airline more than a paid ticket. They can’t exactly fly just 189/233rds of the plane.

Things are much more complicated than that.

Ticket prices are often high shortly before a flight.

That's because those tickets are usually bought by business travelers who don't want to wait and are willing to pay the higher fare.

So it can make sense to have 5 empty seats if you sold a few more for a premium.

There's a lot of math going into optimizing ticket prices.

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#127

Post by rb808 »

njarboe wrote: post #107
kenneth wrote: post #57

The most obvious example of this in daily life is through airlines, where the difference is pretty transparent and you get night-and-day better service by being a loyal customer. With top status with AA and UA (EXP and 1K), you connected to U.S.-based very senior phone agents right away, who always make sure to take care of any issue that arises. 50min delay on your AA flight? No problem, sir, we are rebooking you on…

So if you aren't in the top tier, fly Southwest as much as you can. I do. All the same seats with minor differentiation possible. There are many reasons they have been the only airline to be profitable for decades, but having good service for everyone is definitelty one of the reasons.

Ugh, with the stupid online checkin asap to get the lining up order, I prefer United Basic Economy over Southwest. I even prefer Ryanair over Southwest.

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#128

Post by inetknght »

ggm wrote: post #113

Serious question: google has no helpdesk at the consumer level and a very fractured one in corporate space. (I have GPC. AdWords and some other relationships for work aside from my personal google id so I do believe I know something of what I write, because I've seen at least two or three of the many sides of their product space beyond consumer ones) Does anyone believe they could run some kind of helpdesk at consume…

Yes absolutely. Why do you think there's so many tech support fraud? Why do you think Geek Squad is a thing?

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#129

Post by bjelkeman-again »

lostmyoldone wrote: post #22
DiffEq wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you implying that government, local or national, is "accountable" or "fair" somehow? All of human experience demonstrates the opposite.

Not all human experience. There are certainly countries where government is considered to be - on average - rather fair.

Most (all?) Northern European countries strive hard to achieve that fairness and are reasonably successful in doing so.

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#130

Post by jklinger410 »

mehrdadn wrote: post #91

> Zeta Global, whose clients include wireless carriers, generates scores using data points such as the number of times a customer has dialed a call center and whether that person has browsed a competitor’s website or searched certain keywords in the past few days. Wait, so this means I dial a number and they link my identity to my browser to tell whether I've browsed a competitor's website in the past few days? Is th…

>they link my identity to my browser

They link your phone number to a session/user along with ad networks who have stored cookies on your machine and use predictive modeling to guess at who you are/what you do.

It doesn't work on 90% of the HN crowd, people who block ads/disable javascript, or just don't do a lot of traditional "browsing", but yeah.

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