Tuesday, March 29, 2011

My Experience w/ Virgin America

Now I have done my fair share of traveling for both business and pleasure. There's nothing like a trendy branded airline with comfortable seats, well thought out decor, in-flight wifi, top notch flight attendants, prompt scheduling, and an eye-catching credit card with no annual fee earning frequent flyer miles. I think you all know what airline I am talking about: Virgin America. :)

I have always been a fan since day one even though I didn't become a customer until recently. I also as an entrepreneur know how to really appreciate why Virgin America is a success. However, no business is without growing pains. I am a prime example of a customer that experienced just that. Granted, in all fairness, it's partly due to my own carelessness but what business doesn't have to model around human error? As a technologist, I also understand that some times technical issues can't be avoided from time to time. With that in mind, here's what I called a "nightmare" in an earlier tweet which I think was quite over-exaggerated. I admit I was over-reacting and I apologize if I gave anyone the wrong impression. Nonetheless, I was a bit annoyed.

Anyhow, let's start with some background. So I received a phone call from my cousin one day telling me that she's graduating from her MBA in June and that I would be disowned if I didn't attend her graduation. ;) I was super excited to hear the good news and just within days later, I decided to look for flights on virginamerica.com to San Francisco. I also noticed that I had more than enough points for a one way there but not both ways. So I decided to start by purchasing a one way flight from Seattle to SF w/ my elevate points which threw the following error:



So I followed the instructions and called the number listed above. Given Virgin's high energy and friendly culture, to my surprise, and maybe I just had too high expectations, I got the opposite of what I expected. That part was ok though cause after all, who doesn't get a little cranky once in a while sitting at a call center dealing with stupid customers like me. So I happily moved on with describing my issue with the website. The customer service rep was not very receptive at first but I finally fought my way into getting the both of us on the same page.


To illustrate the issue, I am going use some fictitious numbers. First off, I described to the rep what I was trying to do and what error I was receiving to give context to the issue. After some back and forths to clear the facts, the reaction of the customer service rep was, "Oh thats why... you don't have enough points." When this was said, I was looking at my screen seeing that my profile had 9000 points and I even did a refresh to make sure I was getting the latest numbers which it still remained 9000 after the refresh. So I thought to myself, "the flight only costed 5200 points. What is he talking about?" Then the rep continued on and said, "I show that you only have 3800 points." So I thought, "hum, interesting... it looks like they deducted my points for the flight but didn't book my flight." So I communicated that to the rep and he responded by telling me that there's no one from Elevate that's in at that time so he asked me to send a screenshot to an e-mail and someone will get back to me during the normal hours. Ok, fine, I understand. It was 3 or 4am. So agreed and asked the representative if he can hold the seat/flight for me until the issue has been resolved and stayed on the line to let the representative do what he needed to do before we ended the call. After waiting for a little while, he had apparently forgotten my request and asked me multiple times if there's anything else he can do for me and I just kept asking about the holding of the seat/flight. Finally, he said he did it and the flight will be held for 24 hours. By then, I also already sent the e-mail of my screenshot and booked my return flight with my credit card so we ended the call.

By the next evening, I still have not received any forms of communication so I took it upon myself to try again. Well this time, I was able to purchase the flight with my points! Yay, right? So I happily went on with the other work that I had to accomplish for the evening but it didn't end there. At about 11pm/midnight-ish, it dawned on me! I had accidentally purchased another return flight with my points instead of a flight to SFO! So I scrambled through the site looking under "Manage Travel" --> "Change" in hopes to change the flight but I didn't see the booking at all! So I did a bit of research and revisiting through my experiences with the site before and realized that newly booked flights don't show up right away. So I tired changing the return fligtht that I had originally purchased into a flight to SFO instead since I was able to navigate to it and it was gonna let me change it but the quirk... it was going to charge me $75! By that time, I was pretty frustrated and tired so I just thought I would sleep on it and call during regular hours to resolve the issue.

The next day, I called and got the same tone of voice. I think again, I was expecting a little more energy because this time around is not graveyard shift. Then I thought to myself, oh well, as long as they can help me solve my problem, who cares right? So I went on describing my situation and that I would like to change one of my flights to a SEA to SFO flight. I maybe over sensitive but I felt like I was getting no's left and right and that I was going to be charged $75 no matter what. Of course, being me, I kept on thinking of alternatives and asked if we can do certain things a little differently to derive desirable results. After a few back and forths, we decided on cancelling the flight that I just booked with my points but here's the gotcha: "No one at Elevate is in right now so you will have to wait 72 hours before your points are returned to you..." So I thought to myself, one, there seems to be a bit of inefficiency and disconnect between VA & Elevate and 2, oh great, now I will either risk the price raising on me or the flight gets fully booked before I get my points back. Luckily, I am going to LA in July so I just sucked it up and paid for the flight to SFO and decided to save my points for the LA trip.

72 hours later, the flight I purchased with my points finally disappeared and my points are returned back to my profile. I can finally officially declare this adventure over.

I must say, it was a bit discouraging because it was my first time wanting to use my points after having done my time as a Virgin America customer. But I guess this might just be a one-off type of deal or at least I hope. Of course, I have been working in a client facing role for pretty much all of my career so I'll admit that I am a bit of a fanatic when it comes to customer service and I understand that even the best processes can sometimes let certain unexpected incidents slip. So I may have just set the bar too high. With that said, this is still an area that can improve to make Virgin America even more successful than it already is.

1 comments:

Unknown said...

Jeremy,
First off, let me apologize for what seems like a frustrating experience. I can't speak to your interactions with the call center (I know other folks are looking into it though) but I can address the web site challenges.

One of those growing pains you mentioned comes from the fact that we've been inventing and re-inventing a number of our online systems, in real time, as we grow as an airline. As a result, the pieces of the infrastructure that take and record your booking aren't as tightly coupled with the system that tracks Elevate points as we'd all like them to be. It looks like your initial attempt to book a flight triggered a bug that caused the points you were trying to use to become stuck in a "pending use" state (very like a credit card authorization hold). All 9000 still showed up in your profile because the 5200 hadn't been deducted from your account, but the agent could see that you only had 3800 available to use. We're pushing code that should help us find and address this bug to our test environment later in the week. With a little luck (and some work from our developer team) we should have a solution in place sometime soon.

I hope knowing that we're actively working on a fix somewhat restores your faith in our commitment to deliver the best customer experience in the industry.

Best regards,
Dean Cookson
VP & CIO
Virgin America