Customer Experience Improvement: American Airlines Customer Support6 min read

This post was originally published on Medium here.

I recently had an idea for a series covering desired customer experience (CX) improvements based on experience. Be they product issues, operational issues, or in true TPM fashion, a combination of all the things, writing about such issues is one way to bring awareness to hopefully lead to improvement! As a believer in serendipity, my timing couldn’t have been better, as just 24 hours after having this thought, I was living through bedlam in Miami.

Wait, what happened?

Starting Friday, April 1st, 2022 and continuing through Monday, April 4th, flights were being cancelled one-at-a-time, sometimes at boarding time with no advance warning or delay.¹ My automatically rebooked flight was changed from Saturday to Monday, and even that got cancelled before the day was up.² All told, I had 4 reschedules, and ended up with no flight home, with no recourse through American to have a flight home. In summary, I was stranded.³

But I am not here to complain — I travel enough, I have resources to solve this issue. I am here to explain how all of this should be improved to make the CX better! I do want to callout though for folk without the same resources as I have (remote job, no kids or school to deal with, etc) this is not an acceptable customer experience.

Problem Statement(s)

1. Each reschedule was a ~6 hour process:

• Phone calls suggest a callback that will occur in 2–3 hours, but then take up to 6–7. And yes, this means at any time of the night — be ready to wake up when that callback happens.
• In-person lines took ~6 hours to get through. See the video of the line below, but this is covered in the article linked above — it was no different on Saturday, the day I was stranded, than it was on Friday, the day of the article.

2. Flights went from “on schedule” directly to cancelled shortly after boarding was supposed to begin. Why were they cancelled so last minute, especially if the issue was weather which is known in advance? Why were they not delayed first? Compounded with the 6+ hour reschedule time, and the refusal to rebook passengers at the gate — you had to go wait in the long line mentioned in the first problem statement above — this leads little recourse for the customer.

3. Customer Service (CS) cannot handle “reward travel.” From rescheduling business class on business class to even just issuing a refund, “there’s nothing I can do” is the commonly used phrase by operators when it comes to reward travel.⁴ They then “transfer you to another department” which has an additional wait of ~60m with no option for a callback — this is after you’ve waited 6+ hours for the callback.⁵ Damn you, Conway’s Law!

Proposed Solution

I do not have the internal knowledge to focus on the timing and transparency issues around Problem Statement #2. Yes, this should be addressed, but without knowing the why, I cannot recommend a how. However, a simple solution for Problem Statement #3 will greatly improve Problem Statement #1: from the customer perspective, reward travel must be able to be handled by standard phone, chat, and in-person operators.⁶

There may be different SOPs, but — these SOPs should be available for all operators, and if specialized operators are needed, then the customer shouldn’t wait in the wrong queue for 6+ hours first just to be redirected to the right queue. A small product change to the operational triage process that would significantly improve the CX. Additionally, it would reduce operational burden for issues that an operator is not empowered to assist with, improving operational efficiency. Ie, this is a 2-for-1, and I love such improvements. Note that this would be easiest if the two different operational organizations were aligned under the same organization (ie, one roof), but this is not a hard requirement.

This change would have enabled me to cancel with American right away, which is what I wanted to do. Instead, I had three additional calls with American CS and two chats,⁷ before one agent chatted across support organizations internally to issue my refund. By “outsourcing” such operations to the customer and empowering them to deal with changes on their phone, including canceling American travel, being refunded, and booking with someone else,⁸ American would still have my brand loyalty; now, they do not, and it is unlikely they will ever get it back.

Conclusion

I hope that American does a Root Cause Analysis (RCA) and comes up with an action plan to address the Problem Statements laid out here. Such a process is industry standard for a reason; all companies experience issues, and publicly admitting those issues and explaining the why is a positive move for the brand. It’s why companies such as AWS do this, even when the why is comically embarrassing.⁹ The icing on the cake is that making such an RCA public is the way to win my brand loyalty back. Again, this is a 2-for-1 scenario; improve the company’s CX and the negative perception experienced by customers at the same time.

At the end of the day, customers and companies want the same thing: the best possible CX. American Airlines should demonstrate this desire with public documentation about how to get there, followed by execution on the plan.

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Footnotes

1. They are claiming it is due to weather, and yes, thunderstorms were predicted, but — I was in Miami all day and flights were taking off and landing all day. There were no thunderstorms. Additionally, one flight was cancelled due to “no flight attendants” as per the announcement in the airport, and we’re seeing pilot strikes with other airlines at the same time. I believe this to be a confluence of events, and folk simply don’t know what is going on to properly communicate; other bloggers agree.

2. So yes, at least one flight was cancelled in advance, although weirdly other flights the same day were not. So I went from an automatic reschedule 48 hours later to a reschedule same day after it was cancelled as well.

3. No, American would not pay $1 for any fees for the additional “vacation” stay, although credit card trip insurance allegedly will reimburse some/all of it — a plug for why credit cards like the Chase Sapphire Reserve are so great.

4. That credit card I plugged earlier in citation [3]? Well, there are pros and cons, as “free” travel booked with such rewards comes with unknown price — Customer Service (CS) saying 🤷‍♂️ on how to refund you.

5. And yes, I received a callback at midnight; I was too tired to remain on hold and have no regrets about getting some sleep 😴.

6. You can normally make changes to your flight through the app on the phone, but this doesn’t work when either changing your route or the day of travel; both of these were required in my case. Sure, the app functionality could be expanded to handle this use case, but keep reading — all I really wanted was a refund. So yes, the app should be able to handle a refund, but usually there is an order to making such improvement: operations first, systems second. If operations can’t handle the use case, it will be all the more challenging to try and build out a systemic solution. Hence, I am focusing on the operational solve first, but the systemic solution is the end goal.

7. I didn’t bring up the chat earlier as that is a whole other can of worms:

• Chat has no autocorrect, leading to no capital letters, even for the word “I” from both the customer and operator.
• Chat has the exact same issue of bad wait time estimates, but you have to “remain on the (digital) line” instead of getting a callback.
• You waste time being told incorrect things and will eventually just be rerouted, but this time, with no estimated wait time so you have no idea how long you must wait.

I simply do not recommend using chat for such issues. I have screenshots to share of the issues above, but I do not see a need to share them.

8. And for those that are curious, this is exactly what I did. I rented one of the last rental cars in Miami, drove to Fort Wayne, FL, and flew home the next day on Alaska Airlines. American was not willing to rebook me from another starting city, except for those within very close proximity, even if I got myself to the new location.

9. Yes, a single operator brought down all of Amazon S3 due to a typo. For those that don’t know, Amazon S3 powers a large percentage of total internet traffic across many brands we use daily.