Here’s another question for you, Jodi: who the fuck, besides you, is talking about screaming at employees?
**Mahna ** **Mahna’s ** post implies it.
I am amazed at the clueless nature of many of the posters here.
Bluntly - unless you are a 100k flyer, the airline has no need to listen to you scream. Lost luggage happens. Let us think about who handles your luggage:
- The guys at the curb.
- TSA (in the US).
- The baggage handlers at the airport.
- The Airline employees themselves.
Now, we can add in other random security, weather, and flight delay complications. Considering the millions of miles I have flown, I am personally shocked at how FEW times I have had luggage delayed. I am NOT, however, shocked to find that when I have been cordial and kind to the airport employees that MY bags seem to be delivered straight to my home with no problem at all.
Face it - act like an asshole and you are going to get the airline equivalent of the sneeze muffin at the diner. Your only hope is to either be a frequent flyer or act like a welcome member of society.
And on behalf of everyone who has ever been on the receiving end of piss poor customer service, fuck you right back.
I spent over 10 yrs of my life working in customer service positions and have been responsible for telling customers all sorts of things that they didn’t want to hear. I’ve learned to do it in a tacful fashion, no matter how rude or unreasonable the customer might have been at the time. I expect the same level of professional and courteous treatment when I’m standing on the other side of that conversation.
If you’re in the same boat, then you should know as well as I do that there’s the right way to handle a difficult conversation and the wrong way. Statements like “I don’t know where your bag is, ma’am, and I don’t care. Now just point to the picture that best matches your luggage so that we can get this over with” will generally not result in a good response from a jet-lagged, sleep-deprived, stressed-out traveller. They may have had that conversation a dozen times already that day, but I was having it for the first time and deserved to be handled in a courteous, sympathetic and empathic fashion.
They can rot in hell for all I care.
Mahna Mahna, atomicbadgerrace (who disapproves of it), and Uzi who initially was implicitly defending it (or at least that’s how I read those posts).
It’s a shame if your customer service experience included people calling you an asshole and you just stood there and took it. But your expectation that others will be as tolerant of that sort of behavior is not a reasonable one. There is indeed “a right way to handle a difficult conversation and a wrong way”. But “You will FIND my bag, asshole, and BRING it to my DOOR with the contents intact and accounted for” is not an example of the right way. You may not have deserved to be treated that way, but neither did whoever it was you were calling an asshole.
Screaming would simply get one arrested. The trick is to cost the company without risking arrest, and in a manner by which the company will be able to directly relate the cost to a particular customer service problem. That’s where verbally ruining the day of an employee, but not screaming or acting aggressively, can be effective. Run up AC’s costs by wasting it’s staff’s time, by increasing the amount of time its staff spend on stress leave, and by increasing the rate of staff turnover due to stress. As its costs rise, it will respond by improving its performance, rather than simply putting up a wall as it does now.
**Nothing ** in your original post indicated that the CSR acted poorly. Your post did, however, indicate that YOU acted like an asshole who deserved whatever he got.
I wish more assholes were thrown out of establishments. Then the CSRs could focus on the deserving customers, and let the dickheads walk/starve/etc.
If you really want customer service, it is usually available.
At a business or first class fare.
Sorry, but airline tickets are like anything else you buy. Cheap, fast (on time), or quality. Choose two.
Actually, I never yelled. Didn’t even raise my voice once.
More importantly, I started off dealing with the agent in a very calm, collected and rational fashion. Well, as calm and collected as you can be after flying 2 hrs, dashing through the Paris airport to catch a connecting flight, flying another 7 hrs and then discovering that you have to simultaneously deal with missing luggage AND catch a connecting flight.
However, I was presented with a downright hostile and unhelpful agent. Yes, I swore, after having receiving monosyllabic grunts in response to extremely reasonable and non-hostile questions like “I have to catch a connecting flight to Toronto, so would it be possible to simply deal with this when I get to my final destination?” and “My BF’s name wasn’t called, does that mean his luggage has not been lost?”. It takes a LOT to make me lose my temper, but quite frankly, I’d have been happy to get a chance to speak to a supervisor had it been possible… but as has been said, Air Canada doesn’t escalate customer complaints.
We had to repeat the experience in Toronto when it turned out that his luggage had indeed been lost as well. Given that the agent there was actually pleasant and informative to BOTH OF US, we didn’t have to swear or yell once. See the difference?
Now that you provide more information, yes. You did NOT put any of that in your original post.
See, if you’d flown Air Canada as often as I have, you would know that there was no need to state that the person on the other side of the counter was an unhelpful hostile asshole. It’s a given.
In my experience, that describes 90% of the staff that I’ve dealt with so far - rude, uncommunicative, and sometimes downright surly. They exemplify everything a company should do if they want to alienate a captive customer base… because when it comes to some parts of the country, the choice is either to fly Air Canada, or not go at all, and there’s not much reason to improve your business practices when the government is willing to bail out your insolvent ass time and time again.
Like others who have posted so far, I will purposely fly anything but Air Canada whenever possible, even if it means paying a higher airfare.
Very frequent traveler here. over 700,000 miles and probably about 1500 flights. Quite a few of those flights are on Air Canada. AC has never lost one of my bags. Due to the type of stuff I have to carry, I almost always check luggage.
I have had bags lost maybe 10 times. Of that when you take out a bad run at LAX in late 2003 the number is about 4.
Of all of those lost bags only 1 wasn’t on the very next flight. That one was when my plane was late into Copenhagen during a blizzard, and we only had 15 minutes between flights. I made it, my bad didn’t. It came home a couple of days later on Air France. Several times the next flight was only about 30 minutes later, so I just hung at the airport and grabbed it then.
Having been in customer service I would never yell, or cuss at a baggage agent. Instead I would try to get them on my side. A smile a joke doesn’t cost anything, and just may inspire them to look just a bit harder for you. Calling them an asshole is a cheap shot. They don’t get to call you an asshole right back, even though you have demonstrated that you are one. I am guessing that several people in this thread have never heard the phrase you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar.
To make my point clearer: A customer service agent should not be surprised if a person under stress reacts in a way they normally wouldn’t. Being tired and crabby by flying the red eye, then being poked and prodded as if it was assumed you were a criminal, and pretty much every other indignity that travel entails (and I should know, I fly over 100,000km every year), causes stress, lots of it. Then when you finally feel you are free of the wanna be gestapo types, they hit you with the final insult of losing your bags. You wonder why someone would snap at the only rep of the company that they can see at that point? Is it right that they should take their frustrations out on the clerk? Maybe not, but it is understandable why some would.
This is not the same thing as walking into a Mcdonalds and screaming at the teller that you were given a Big Mac when you wanted a Whopper instead. Or finding your steak was cooked to medium instead of medium-rare. It is a different kettle of fish. The airline was entrusted with your personal items. They didn’t do what they promised to do and now those items are lost/stolen/misplaced. People rightfully get upset over such things.
First of all, barring international requirements for positive passenger bag matching, the airline makes no promise to deliver your bags on the same flight as you. I’m sorry if you’re under the mistaken impression that by checking a bag, the airline is making a guarantee that it will arrive with you, but it’s not.
Second of all, no, no one expects anyone to not be upset. That’s not the point. Baggage claim agents are well aware that every customer they talk to will be upset. What they should NOT have to deal with are the people who are rude, abusive, and downright nasty. There’s a civil, humane way to be upset, and a rude, jackass way to be. I’ve told plenty of the latter kind to take their business elsewhere.
I don’t mind if the bag comes in on a later flight that day. I do mind if it comes in on a flight later that week, goes to the wrong city(or sometimes even wrong country!), comes in damaged, comes in a large cardboard box because the suitcase itself is destroyed, or comes in with items missing. I expect, and I demand, that these things not happen. This attitude of “We’ve already got your money, so we are not going to put up with any belligerence on your part, and we are not going to contact anybody higher up because it’s our policy, so if you don’t like it take your business elsewhere.” is not acceptable. I will take my business elsewhere after my business with you is satisfactorily completed.
If, as the case of AirCanada, the policy is to have the only contact for the customer at the airport a low-level employee with a crappy attitude and who is instructed not to pass the buck further up the chain, what the hell can you do?
You’ll get better results if you aren’t a douchebag to the guy trying to help you.
Gar! You’re right! What was I thinking? Oh, wait…
Fly WestJet. (of course, that doesn’t work for all of us. But they are expanding their routes…)
It’s nice to know that they are expanding their routes. I guess the bigger complaint is the growing number of companies that use so-called “Customer Service” as a buffer between them and the customers they are supposed to serve. More and more, the only people you have access to when you have a legitimate complaint are low-level red shirts with no authority to do anything and an unwilllingness(and sometimes orders not) to pass it up the chain of command. They are designed to be easily-replaceable cannon fodder, and unless there is an incredible turnover of these low-level personnel for a particular reason, the problem is not going to get taken care of.