Yelled at by customer service rep
This has never happened to me before where I was absolutely yelled at by a customer support representative— for asking for help that they were able to provide at the end.
Basically, I booked a flight with AA, a roundtrip from JFK to LHR and then LHR back to JFK. The JFK to LHR portion was operated by BA, but still purchased via AA.
The day of the travel, BA cancels the flight because there is some issue with the aircraft and deplanes all of us. And then BA rebooked me on a later flight via Aer Lingus that would still get me to LHR.
But after a day in London, I had a bad feeling that maybe my entire itinerary got screwed up, so I tried to look up my booking via the confirmation code and saw that the entire trip was….just gone.
When I saw this, I immediately called AA support, because maybe there was some technical glitch where it thought that I never made it to LHR, which would mean that the rest of my itinerary would get cancelled.
The first customer service representative was fine— she immediately knew that something was wrong and was able to escalate it to her supervisor.
However, the second representative was where it went south. She basically told me that she couldn’t do anything because BA had done something to my itinerary and that I should take this up with BA because there was nothing she could do.
Fearing that I would be in this back and forth between AA and BA, I asked whether or not it would be possible for them to actually just issue me a ticket here because its their flight, operated by them and surely they could if there were open seats. Then I asked her if there is anyone that could help in just issuing a new ticket, to which she just exploded into a tirade, yelling “AIN’T NOBODY GOING TO HELP YOU”.
At that point, I politely asked her to see if she could escalate me to another supervisor, and that supervisor was eventually able to help me out and get the itinerary reinstated.
But this is where I was absolutely flabbergasted— in the end, someone there was able to help me and they had the power to correct the situation for their customer. But why the sudden explosion and tirade that was super unprofessional and uncalled for? Why not escalate it to someone else if they feel they cannot resolve the situation?It is almost as if these days, if customers actually expect the service that they paid for, it’s considered…ridiculous?
I just wanted to rant here because I don’t think I have ever had this happen before with a support department— where I was yelled at for simply asking if anything could be done to rectify the situation.