I am not sure why the travel industry provides the best stories for customer service, but alas, it is.
I needed to order tickets for my wife through Orbitz. Because they didn’t provide connecting flights, I had to order them as two separate tickets. As happens quite frequently, I had to change them later.
I was on a call with a representative for almost an hour when I mistakenly brushed my iPhone screen in the wrong place and hung up the call. Fortunately, my office door was closed so no one heard what I said.
We were so close to completing everything and poof. I immediately called back with a faint hope of picking up where we were. Of course, I was connected to another representative. He looked at my account but because there were no changes recorded to my record, he proposed that we start the process over from the beginning.
“But I have the name of the person who had been helping me!” I said. (Being in the customer service business, I know the importance of writing these things down). But I was told that it was “impossible” to connect to the person who had just been helping me a couple minutes before. Frustrated, I hung up and decided to do it later from home.
Now how frustrating is this:
When I got home, I had a message from the first rep that I was talking to. She tried to call me to finish the transaction, but she only had my home phone number, which was the number of record on my account.
If only she could have called me back using the phone number I had used to call them! Or what if when I called back, the system would have recognized it was probably related to a call from the same person just minutes before and automatically route me to the same rep? That would have saved Orbitz an hour of labor, and saved me an hour plus a lot of anger and frustration.
When you look for contact center systems for sales and customer service, ask your vendor how they can help you. Intelligent service like this will pay back handsomely in goodwill.