2am this morning I woke up with a start. I’d booked flights to Taipei for this Saturday about 2 months ago, but purchased them on a book now/pay later arrangement that required payment to be made by April 9th. I woke up with a start because I realised that I had not in fact paid for the flights. Quickly jumped on the Internet and checked and the flights were gone. Tried to book the same flights online and it said “flight full”. Aww crap… I was in a panic. I called the Qantas Platinum Frequent Flyer line at 2:15am and told the customer service rep of my problem. I was in a panic. He asked for my old booking number which I gave to him and within a few minutes he’d rebooked my flight on the SAME flights as before. sigh… I was relieved. He told me that I’d loose the original $25 “deposit” on the original flights but that was not an issue for me – I was ON THE FLIGHT!
Now I could get back to bed. The thing here for me though was the ease with which the Qantas Customer Service rep handled this. He could hear the intense panic in my voice, and calmly set about dealing with the problem. He even said in closing “now you can get a few hours sleep…” which was kind of a nice touch. I know that if I get a customer service survey from Qantas, that this experience will rank well in my mind.
Anyway – this begs the question – what do you and your team do to give outstanding customer service to your clients? Do you do customer surveys to find out how you are doing?
Wayne, given that my 30 Qantas flights & over $13000 in fares was not enough to retain Gold status in the past 12 months, the amount you would have spent on flights would have been substantial, so while I agree that this is great customer service, in this situation I would be expecting Qantas to have contacted you before you had missed the deadline, or alternatively, waived the $25 *deposit*.