Delta Deux

Thank you all for the encouraging mails and tweets yesterday after reading the post on my saga with Delta Air Lines. A few things happened yesterday and while the situation isn’t resolved, some progress was made. At the same time, as I found a few more ways to interact with Delta, I had a few more thoughts appended to my thinking on their customer care efforts.
NOTE: If you haven’t been playing along with our home version, this is the link to yesterday’s post for background.

Here we are, 48 hours later and still no email from Delta resolving the problem nor an email acknowledging that I’ve sent them anything.  No tweets back on Twitter either. I found that one can restore one’s miles after expiration, which was not something offered as an option by either of the humans with whom I spoke the other day.  In my case, I was quoted a price of over $1,800 to do so, or almost double what I’d pay in air fare for the tickets for which I’d be using them.  I’m not sure how much of a service that really is.

I went through the exercise of trying to book the tickets on their site to check availability.  In the course of that, a little button popped up asking if I wanted to chat with a live agent. WOW! You bet I do!

The service was provided via a software from eStara which states that

many companies realize ROI by using text chat to engage multiple customers at once and leverage canned responses and knowledgebase systems to address issues with low to moderate complexity.

Of course, the “canned” responses failed miserably although not as badly as the software. I went through 3 sessions, the first 2 of which had the person (I think it was a person) on the other end abruptly ending our chat.  The third person said they couldn’t read what I was typing.  Fail.  As with the email and Twitter activities in which Delta is engaged, companies should not do it if you’re not going to support it properly, which means at a level that your customers, and not your CFO, feels works for them.  Social media is not a campaign – it’s an on-going part of your marketing mix – and it requires full-time, very competent support.

After a lot of work on the search engines, I came up with a contact name in the executive offices.  One very pleasant phone call later, I hung up with a promise that I’d hear back from them within 24 hours.  Of course, they called last night and I missed the call.  I called back this morning – not surprisingly the person who was working last night isn’t in (even I don’t work 24 hours a day!) but they aren’t accepting voicemail so today will be spent dialing Atlanta every hour until I get them – hopefully they’re working today.  Not sure why a person who is interacting with the public doesn’t have voicemail but in the scheme of things, I’m not surprised.

Stay tuned!  And if you know of anyone at Delta, please pass me to them.