Next-Gen Customer Service?

So I get this phone call from Delta about an upcoming trip.

"Sir your connection from Madrid got cancelled" "We can get you on a later connection or re-route you but cannot upgrade you in that case" says Linda. So my choice basically is spend 8 hours at Madrid airport or fly in coach on the flight over the water. Realizing the choices she offered were not great (with all the upgrade issues I have recently had), she quickly goes "We still have a couple of days. Let me keep seeing what I can do"

In the mean time, I go to the Delta website and with their new seat inventory transparency find a connection through London where the over water leg is wide open. I call Linda the next day and get her voice mail. I point to those flights and request she move me over.

15 minutes later she calls back and says "Do you really want to go through London? I got an executive to approve your upgrade on the non-stop flight"

Wow. A month ago I was ready to dump Delta after 3 million miles. Now I am thinking this is how customer service should work.

Let me deal with a named person. With a specific phone number and a voice mail (and preferably email). Give me access to as much product and customer information in the system as the rep has access to- two sets of eyes are better than one. Empower them to escalate for approvals, rather than rotely say no. Have executives who think about life time customer revenue maximization not just profitability of the next transaction.

What's so rocket science about this? The fact that is seems to happen so infrequently these days.

Comments

[James Taylor]

I agree with you and I have one additional comment. Why make her ask for approval from a person, why not automate the approval so she could do it herself (a simple life time value model and some rules about this kind of "upgrade" would allow the decision to be automated). That way you would not need to call back and they would not risk that the connection you found was with someone else...
JT