I had an old roommate do this. He purchased plane tickets from American Airlines and they had the option to pay through PayPal. He choose that option. Money went through, and tickets were immediately canceled by A A. He called them and they said “that’s a bug that happens sometimes. The tickets will be refunded in 5-7 business days, just place the order again and it should work.”
It didn’t work.
He called them again at 805 the next morning. He got told the same line. He refused to hang up until it was made right. He was on the phone with that poor agent for 11. 5 hours. Eventually she just said" look sir, you were my first call of the day and I’m now on overtime, I’m transferring you to my manager".
Manager did make it right, he got free tickets(about $800 dollars), an additional $1600 on future flight vouchers, and about a week later the transactions were reversed. He came out of it with 2400 in profit. That said 11.5 hours on the phone making small talk with customer serviceand refusing to hang up might just push me over the edge.
Manager ahould have taken that call from the agent within the hour, and had the same result.
That was poorly managed.But hey at least they were both pissing in bottles
My thought
Supposedly atleast at the time they were not allowed to terminate the call for any reason.
That’s normal. Being on one call for hours is not normal and should be reviewed during the call.
If the manager had been good they would have been right next to the agent helping them resolve the issue, not wait until the next shift comes in to do it for them.Come to think of it, i wonder is she even got any breaks or lunch that day…
Definitely ate at her desk. But actual breaks? That’s a good question.
Wouldn’t be surprised if she put him on “hold” to “check” on something and just used it as a quick bathroom break.
He was on the phone for the whole time, most of it on the balcony and I would go out to smoke and over hear him but I didn’t watch the whole time.
Why did the agent even last an hour.
There were multiple better ways to handle that.
- There is nothing more I can do so I am terminating this line – shit customer service
- My tool set is limited in what it can do so to continue I am transferring you to a supervisor – better customer service but ignoring the situation as the manager likely can’t do anything either (as proven by the fact that eventually they just decided it wasn’t worth fighting and paid the guy off)
- You will need to use a different payment method to continue, I empathize with your situation but this is clearly an issue with somewhere with the payment provider. (this is honestly the “right” option. It was clear there was an issue somewhere with AA and Paypals payment system, trialing the definition of insanity is never a good thing. Just state you can’t do anything, request a different payment method and file a report on it for the engineering team to investigate into.)
The fact that the company spent 11.5 hours of wages on one customer and then on top of that credited them a theoretical $2400 on top of that is insanity. The call should have taken no more than an hour tops excluding wait time. I expect that poor agent got a stern talking to after, and likely that agents supervisor as well, because that was not handled properly on either the customer service end nor the company end.
Like, I’m super super skeptical any agent would stay on the line that long.
If nothing else they just hang up on you. It was an “accident”. There’s also no recourse for it.
Supposedly they weren’t able to terminate the call for any rrsson(at the time, almost a decade ago). I will agree it should of been escalated much faster though.
Honestly yea, the agent definitely shouldn’t have lasted that long. Escalate and then the manager can make the call on whether to drop the customer or not.
Honestly I feel like he was kinda right, they took $1600 from him, held it for a week, by following their directions and basically told him to get over it.
I will say he was perfectly nice to the agent, no cursing or raising a voice, just “no I won’t hang up till you resolve this.” “sir there is nothing I can do” “I won’t hang up till you resolve this” in a single monotone voice for 11.5 hours… That agent probably needs therapy.
The issue is “they” as in AA aren’t the ones holding that money, once the company cancels the payment it’s actually the bank (in this case either paypal or the card provider) that is withholding the money. Merchants generally don’t even receive the funds until like 4 or 5 days after authorization so they never had the money to hold.
Paypal in particular has one of the longer authorization falloffs, with 7-14 days at worst I’ve seen. Most banks run a 3-4 day falloff, but that’s not the fault of the airline, that’s strictly a Paypal problem.
In this case the airline decided to credit him which was nice but, the airline wasn’t the one holding the credit, the payment provider was, so really it wasn’t the responsibility of the airline to fix it.
This is also one of the reasons why some companies (like steam for example) take the money regardless if you refund or if it fails processing) and then treats it like a return crediting it back, this bypasses that authorization falloff by taking the money, and then sending the money back, but this of course increases the merchants fees in regard to that payment processor
That doesn’t change the fact this is clearly a known issue from AA and they continue to let that payment method get used. It’s their fault and on them to resolve because of that. Especially after they said to just try again.
I fully agree it’s sometimes a self created issue(although payment processors screw stuff up all the time as well so depending on the flow it might not be) but it’s not one that is their responsibility to resolve, they have canceled the transaction on their end, its on the payment processor to realize this and give the money back.
The only responsibility they have in this is investigating the issue on their end(which considering that trying again sometimes fixes it it may not even be on their end) to fix the payment flow, there’s no further obligation to the customer. They can’t give back money they don’t have, what ends up happening is like what the above described where the company takes a financial loss due to someone elses problem. Our old SOP for wireless deposits in the store I was at(we did a lot of second party contracting with Verizon and ATT) was informing the customer that the transaction has been cancelled/returned and should appear in the next 5-7 business days. If they complained we would state if they need the money sooner they could try contacting the payment provider, but it was out of our hands at this point. Us providing them money would end up giving the customer back the money twice, which was in no circumstance going to happen.
You could make the argument that it’s good customer service but like… at the end of the day, theres no obligation and the company needs to run. It’s a price analysis. Will giving this credit eventually give a net profit on this customer? At a potential $2600 loss unless they are a frequent flyer I’m guessing no.
I felt bad for customers that did a credit check for a phone, just to have it fail during processing, because it likely would fail the next retry due to a recent credit check, but we were out of options at that point, the store didn’t have a local payment scheme to set the customer up on, and they couldn’t just make it work without fully eating the cost of the device, which also the company wouldn’t be willing to do. It sucks for both parties.
Interesting, I did not know that, I always blamed the company.
“Sir, I’m afraid there’s been a suicide in one of the suicide prevention cubicles.”
“Soo …should i hang?”
“Yes please, i am legal… wait what are yo…?”
“TOO LATE! - tooooooooooooooooooo,”
Poor Bobby Hill
