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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

#331

Post by paulie_a »

I've actually had success with simply emailing a company stating the issue and politely stating my frustrations with their phone menu. Always be polite with CSRs obviously as a decent human being.

On a side note I wish the phrase "our menu options have recently changed" would go away. no they haven't, and no there is not a higher than normal call volume.

Just firing off an email is worth attempting, one time I actually used the phrase "give me a holler" and got a call back the next morning. The problem was immediately taken care of.

Button mashing used to work but now the systems aggressively hang up on you. And I have no idea why I am prompted to enter account details just to be asked for the same info, apparently the systems are capable of playing ads every 15 seconds, but can't transfer info.

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

#332

Post by Teknoman117 »

wpietri wrote: post #96
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…

Tangent: Are there other people here who just refuse to sign up for any of these programs? I have family members who are super into frequent flyer programs, credit card points, etc, etc. But I don't like the cognitive load they introduce, and I don't like having to figure out how much I'm being manipulated in any given interaction. I get that I'm missing out on goodies, but they're paying for those goodies somehow, s…

One of my buddies took about a business credit card with great airline miles features before entering college. He had the money to pay for college due to his employment during school, so he paid for tuition, rent, etc all with the card and paid it off at the end of every month and racked up a hell of a lot of airline miles. He took many, many trips to Asia (from California) on the miles he got. I kinda wish I did the same...

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

#333

Post by jasone »

wpietri wrote: post #96
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…

Tangent: Are there other people here who just refuse to sign up for any of these programs? I have family members who are super into frequent flyer programs, credit card points, etc, etc. But I don't like the cognitive load they introduce, and I don't like having to figure out how much I'm being manipulated in any given interaction. I get that I'm missing out on goodies, but they're paying for those goodies somehow, s…

Absolutely, yes. I refuse 1) because loyalty programs are generally designed to increase income rather than save customers money, and 2) I loathe the way the airline programs play to snobbery.

I tend toward cattle class seats to avoid being on the wrong side of the class system, even though my knees complain.

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

#334

Post by stephen_g »

wpietri wrote: post #96
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…

Tangent: Are there other people here who just refuse to sign up for any of these programs? I have family members who are super into frequent flyer programs, credit card points, etc, etc. But I don't like the cognitive load they introduce, and I don't like having to figure out how much I'm being manipulated in any given interaction. I get that I'm missing out on goodies, but they're paying for those goodies somehow, s…

I get the sentiment, but for air travel it's totally worth it for me at least. I travel a fair bit at work, and we just use one main airline (and by extension, alliance) by default. The cognitive load is just giving them an eight digit number when we book - that's literally it. And in return I get extra baggage allowance, lounge access with free food, more choice of seat selection, etc. Sure, if you don't do enough travel or have to use multiple different airlines it doesn't make sense, but for a lot of people it really does.

For me, if I just refused to participate then I would do the same flying with the same airline and just wouldn't get any of the free benefits... That's before free flights and upgrades that I can then purchase with the points.

So it makes a lot of sense then to get a credit card that earns extra points into the same account for purchases I would have made anyway. I'm now starting to think about my next trip, which will be business class to five countries in Europe (from Australia). Would cost about $10-15K in airfares (which I would never have paid myself) but I'll have to pay probably about a grand in taxes and most of the points I've gathered over about two years of work travel and credit card purchases I would have done anyway.

At the end of the day, the cost of this is already baked into the services, so you're paying for it whether you participate or not!

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

#335

Post by sho »

Geekette wrote: post #301
sokoloff wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Except that airlines still get the bulk of their revenue from economy class. That's exactly backwards from anything I've ever read about airline economics. Do you have any references to support? https://kottke.org/17/03/the-economics-of-airline-classes suggests that on a given BA LHR IAD flight, the 122 economy seats total about $107K, the 40 premium economy seats about $106K, the 48 business class seats about $322…

No references off head but I stumbled upon it while working on airline related project some years back. The key thing being proper cost accounting showed it wasn't lucrative as portrayed. Citations on premium class margins don't account for the higher costs of servicing such customers (ground/airborne food and entertainment, lounges, transportation, exclusive services, etc). While some may have a few planes with high…

You really need references to support that claim because it's also the complete opposite of everything I've ever heard.

While it's true that simply multiplying seat numbers by advertised prices is not giving the whole picture, and running lounges isn't free, the extra costs are absolutely outweighed by the far higher cost of the ticket. Full service airlines would fill the whole plane with business if they have the demand (and sometimes do).

Economy can still be profitable, of course, and there's far more passengers of that class - so airlines will obviously still run all-economy flights if the business class demand is already satisfied on a route. There's no question they're less profitable, though.

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

#336

Post by nicolas_t »

wpietri wrote: post #312
hueving wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only like 5 minutes of your time (if that), unless you have difficulties following basic account sign up processes on a website.

Except that as this person explains, it's a huge time suck to do well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18359808

Well there's different levels to it. He went full bore and did a lot of first class travel (which is harder to get due to low availability). If you just take a couple of hours getting familiarized with the different frequent traveler miles program and chose the right one for your travel pattern, plus make sure to get a credit card with a decent mile accumulation rate, you can already get a couple of business class long haul flights out of it.

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

#338

Post by GordonS »

wlll wrote: post #273
wpietri wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tangent: Are there other people here who just refuse to sign up for any of these programs? I have family members who are super into frequent flyer programs, credit card points, etc, etc. But I don't like the cognitive load they introduce, and I don't like having to figure out how much I'm being manipulated in any given interaction. I get that I'm missing out on goodies, but they're paying for those goodies somehow, s…

I signed up for the BA frequent flyer program and "cognitive load" really didn't ring true for me. Basically, I add my frequent flier number to the booking form online and that's it. When I hit Bronze (it's a couple of long flights or so) I don't need to do anything, I just get to skip the queue at checkin and (airport depending) security. There's no sales, no emails, no upsell, my (travelling) life is just better af…

Try to actually use your points on a flight or upgrade and you'll see problems - it can be extremely difficult to find availability, even if you are prepared to book a year in advance, and the BA tools for searching are buggy as hell.

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

#339

Post by ankit219 »

da_chicken wrote: post #140
jklinger410 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

You know, I'm quickly reaching a point where I want the default browser to work in Incognito mode, and the browser should only switch to regular mode when I explicitly whitelist the domain.

Disable cookies by default. If a website can't function without enabling cookies open it in incognito

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

#340

Post by gabriel-uribe »

PenguinCoder wrote: post #270
kenneth wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The price differences are not as stark as you say. Business class in particular has gotten quite cheap these days. In the past few months, I flew round-trip California to Beijing 3 times for $1,900 in business class. That's affordable to many people, and quite reasonable. There are a lot of perks even when you don't get an upgrade. The intangibles (being taken care of when issues arise — I've received amazing service…

Most people aren't flying international to begin with, and certainly not people trying to stay affordable. In that price range, 1900 per ticket is out of reach and certainly insane tonthink 'affordable' to an average customer of airline service.

Agreed. I just paid $270 to get to China from California.
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