Color me surprised.
A bit of the surprise is that most flights from my recent trip didn’t post automatically to my MileagePlus account. Normally they do a few days after the flight. This trip didn’t have any surprises or hiccups along the way, though there were partner segments involved. Maybe that messed things up. Either way, a week after the outbound trip and three days after the return flight I logged in to my account and saw that none of the outbound and only one of the return segments had posted. Time to make my claim.
I filled out the web form and got the confirmation that they’d look in to it. I don’t really like that there is never a follow-up email telling me the end result of that “looking in to it” part of the process but such is life, I suppose. I also posted about it on Twitter, not because I was seeking nor expecting help but because it is the sort of thing I’ve found that people like to bond about on Twitter (and I did get a couple responses to that effect).
Seems my outbound @United flights from last week never credited but the return partially did. This will be fun to chase down.
— Seth Miller (@WandrMe) April 14, 2014
At this point I was pretty much ready to let it go and follow up again next week when I bothered to remember that this happened. A few hours later I received a rather unexpected email:
It seems that, while my tweet didn’t garner a response to me from the @united crew it did set things in motion. And, as promised, this morning the UA-operated flights showed up on my statement.
There is the small part where the PQDs don’t appear to be correct yet (the missing 227 probably doesn’t really matter for me and maybe it’ll show up in the pending flight and the missing LH FRA-HAM bit) and the other two segments are still missing, but I am quite impressed that they followed up on this unsolicited. The part where I don’t believe they are doing that for everyone all the time (or even me all the time) tempers my excitement a bit, but it is nice to see that they are able to take a request and route it to the proper group internally. I’ve had mixed results with similar requests from other airlines so getting this one without really asking was particularly nice.
There’s also the part where I never sent them a specific DM on this with my MileagePlus account number, though I’ve done so in the past. Clearly they have associated my Twitter account with the real life me in a CRM system somewhere in the company. That might be a bit creepy to some people, I suppose, but in the end I think that’s what customer service is all about. They’re able to track interactions across multiple touch points and respond appropriately. A bit more consistency would certainly be welcome, but I’ll take what I can get. And this is definitely a nice bit of unexpected service.
Related Posts:
Never miss another post: Sign up for email alerts and get only the content you want direct to your inbox.
Like you, @united knows my Twitter handle too. As you intimate, it’s probably a good thing. They know so much else about their pax anyway what’s one more identifier?
What about the tweet US airways put out to @ellerafter
It’s interesting that you didn’t get a response from the contact form. I had a reroute and submitted an ORC claim using the form. About a day later I got a response that they had made the adjustments.
Good CRM at work. Will be a very nice touch if A.P. does follow up with you personally later in the month to close things out. Keep us posted.
I’m sure they have your handle in a CRM system. If I were them, I’d track Klout score, too. Even if one doesn’t give your social media handles to them in a DM, I’m sure their various contests are used to gather this type of info.