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Startup Lessons, Courtesy of United Airlines’ Crappy Customer Service

blog.wepay.com

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Re: Startup Lessons, Courtesy of United Airlines’ Crappy Customer Service

#101

Post by rdl »

jmtame wrote: post #95
edw519 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this blog is completely justified, and it shows that wepay stands behind its commitment of customer service. It also shows that wepay (through this blog rant) is not saavy in some pretty standard ways of the world. Which is a real big fucking concern for anyone who's thinking about trusting them with their money. OP says it himself with his very first "lesson", "Don’t optimize for the edge-case." Then he violates his…

maybe we just have a disagreement over what's appropriate to put in company blogs. maybe it's safer to stick with simple product updates and policy changes (and it probably is in most cases), but this is the type of stuff i like to see. it shows me there are human beings behind a company and that they're committed to certain values. i enjoy supporting those types of companies, and i know if i have a problem i'll be a…

If you want to add "color" to a company blog, you talk about positive things of a somewhat personal or offbeat nature. If he wanted to describe how the WePay team went on a road trip to a conference and stopped at some amazing place where the customer service was hands-on and handled exceptions well, that would be great. Or just about some board game which they really enjoy playing at the office.

Whining about vendors, especially when you are partially or technically somewhat at fault, is something you do on "friends-only" posts, personal facebook, etc.

Re: Startup Lessons, Courtesy of United Airlines’ Crappy Customer Service

#102

Post by dkersten »

rdl wrote: post #90
dkersten wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nevermind all that. My comment was purely targetted at the text I quoted. I just meant that saying " my online system sucks and you shouldn't care (or should be complacent) because its just a hack on top of some legacy system " isn't an excuse you should accept. Just because you do not feel its worthwhile to replace the underlying system (and I'm not arguing over whether it is or isn't), doesn't make it alright that…

I agree it isn't ideal, but given limited resources, there are a lot of cases where having a good manual/human exception handling procedure is a better solution than fixing the software. (And training employees to "be nice to customers, pretend your boss's mother is flying today" would improve all interactions with the airline; fixing this one particular bug wouldn't be as generally beneficial. Realistically United w…

I agree with what you're saying, but I still can't help but feel you are missing the point I wanted to make (or perhaps you didn't miss it and simply wanted to add to it to tie it back to the article, in which case I apologize and you should feel free to ignore me).

Somebody made a judgement call and decided that X was more cost effective than Y. Somebody else is inconvenienced by this decision and complains about it. Saying that the complaint is invalid because X is a dirty hack is not, IMHO, a valid excuse. Saying (as you have) that it was decided that X was more cost effective than Y and that is why X was chosen is a valid excuse.

The only reason I'mpushing the point is because I hear those kinds of excuses all the time, applied to all sorts of things.

Re: Startup Lessons, Courtesy of United Airlines’ Crappy Customer Service

#103

Post by jcl »

rdl wrote: post #36

I'm curious if he's ever flown much before. Missing the first leg of a discount coach r/t canceling the entire reservation has been standard since at least 1980. Yes, their online systems should be better at explaining what happens once you've missed a flight, but fundamentally the web apps for airlines are dirty hacks layered on top of mainframe systems, and don't handle exceptions particularly well. Airline pricing…

Since you seem to know a bit about "airline hacking", I'm wondering... Would the OP have gotten away with it if he skipped the second leg instead of the first, in a case where the direct flight is more expensive than round-trip? Or do the airlines have a way to discourage that?

Re: Startup Lessons, Courtesy of United Airlines’ Crappy Customer Service

#104

Post by rdl »

jcl wrote: post #103
rdl wrote: post #36

I'm curious if he's ever flown much before. Missing the first leg of a discount coach r/t canceling the entire reservation has been standard since at least 1980. Yes, their online systems should be better at explaining what happens once you've missed a flight, but fundamentally the web apps for airlines are dirty hacks layered on top of mainframe systems, and don't handle exceptions particularly well. Airline pricing…

Since you seem to know a bit about "airline hacking", I'm wondering... Would the OP have gotten away with it if he skipped the second leg instead of the first, in a case where the direct flight is more expensive than round-trip? Or do the airlines have a way to discourage that?

I burn return legs all the time, with no consequences. I believe in the 1970s if you did that too much, airlines would potentially blacklist you, but it really isn't a problem now. I've even had airline employees wink wink nudge nudge encourage purchasing a much cheaper r/t vs o/w when the price differential was huge.

Re: Startup Lessons, Courtesy of United Airlines’ Crappy Customer Service

#109

Post by patrickk »

arethuza wrote: post #91
swombat wrote: post #16

If you would like the European equivalent of this customer experience, I warmly recommend you try out Air France. If you want even worse, try Ryanair. They actually pride themselves on treating their customers like cattle, dumb-ass sheep to be fleeced at every opportunity.

Ryanair's website is truly evil - who would have guessed that "No I don't want insurance" is half way down the list of countries. However, the flight experience is OK - comparable with your usual charter flight carriers and the value for money is exceptional.

Around the turn of the millennium two students built a prototype Ryanair website and asked for IR£15,000 (at the time) for it. Ryanair bargained them down to IR£12,000.

Their booking process is held up as a textbook 'how not to do usability' case study. The amount of money they can potentially milk from you in the "services" section of the booking process (stuff listed by default as €0.00 like the SMS booking confirmation) is almost funny.

Re: Startup Lessons, Courtesy of United Airlines’ Crappy Customer Service

#110

Post by dedward »

ghshephard wrote: post #47
ghshephard wrote: post #5

I stopped reading here: "I ended up skipping my the flight from SFO to LAX because a friend of mine was driving down the night before; I figured I would keep him company on the drive, and I would get to spend an extra night in LA." In my experience, that basically canceled his set of flights ,and he was no longer a customer. That's been my experience for at least 10 years of flying. I didn't read the rest of the arti…

Reading the replies, I realize how mediocrity can settle in just through the inability to shake your head and say "There must be a better way!" I'm totally used to having my latter flight-segments canceled when I miss the first leg, the airlines are used to it - we've settled into a steady state of poor customer delivery and poor customer experience, without realizing - there might be a new potential out there. I thi…

Buy full-fare tickets for each leg and you don't have this problem. Cancel at the last second, fly any day you want (as long as there is space). Change your plans on a whim.

If you get a package deal though - it's a package.

But nobody wants to pay full-fare - they want to pay about a quarter of that. Sure, we may all be saying "Well that's just how it is"... but you know what? That's just how it is.

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