putting the "er" in "customer service"

[waider]

While I'm bitching about websites, I feel I should share this: in the midst of cleaning I came across my ticket stubs from my Iceland trip and figured I should register for frequent flyer miles in case I manage to limbo in underneath whatever minimal flight-distance requirements they have. First, I tried British Airways, but I couldn't get it to recognise the ticket number - in fact, it wouldn't allow me to put in the last digit of the ticket number. So I tried the alternative method, which was to give it my flight details (and frankly this makes a lot more sense to me, because it was only due to the fact that one of my tickets hadn't been stubbed that I had a ticket number handy at all), whereupon it presented me with a form allowing space for name, date, flight number, departure and arrival points, and the error message, "please input a ticket number". Er, where, exactly?

So, I figured I'd try Aer Lingus instead, since the LHR/DUB legs had been codeshares, and it's all One World Alliance stuff anyway. I know Aer Lingus have me registered on their website since they spammed me about baggage checkins the other day, despite my having ticked the "no spam" checkbox... but I digress. First, I couldn't get it to let me in, since it didn't recognise the email address which I took from the spam they'd sent, or any variant on it, or just my unadorned email address. I dug out my old Aer Lingus frequent flyer stuff, keyed in my old membership number and a likely password, and presto, logged in. Checked the profile, and sure enough there was one of the email address variants I'd tried to use to log in. And the checkbox saying "no spam", too.

Anyway, back to the task at hand. I clicked on "join frequent flyer programme", and was presented with my profile page, except slightly different - things like a pull-down list for the county instead of a text field - so I checked it for errors (wait, my birthday is the 11th, not the 12th...) and clicked the submit button.

"Cannot Update Member Profile at this time. Please try again later."

Uh. Ok. Well, I've a flight to Switzerland booked. Best check that, just in case it's been broken or something.

"Your session has timed out."

A few more attempts reveals that there is no way to get into the section that will show me my booked flights: even going directly to it from login results in the "session timeout" message. Err. Ok, well, I'll poke around the rest of the logged-in options to see if anything else works. Click on "view/update profile". Check the details, change the phone number which for some reason has no area code attached (meaning they'd end up talking to Superquinn in Bray), press submit.

At this point I just fell about laughing.

The page insists that it can't update my profile, because I haven't provided a title. Underneath this message is the current state of my profile; the title, first name and surname fields are uneditable (so I can't correct the error) and more to the point the title field is set to "Mr." already.

Tell me again why I even bother trying?

Comments

[eejitalmuppet.livejournal.com]

As has often been said, it isn't the despair which hurts, it's the hope. Apparently you're an inveterate optimist.

Just to give you another data point, I switched electricity and gas providers earlier this year. In some senses the new lot haven't been too bad, but my attempt to register to deal with things online was a bad joke. Went through a couple of secure pages, then got a fat error message. Tried again, same result. Lather rinse repeat. So, I sent them a bug report detailing exactly where I was getting the error message, in the follish hope that they might try to fix the website. After several days of nothing, I got an email message from a customer service muppet, suggesting that I send all those important details in an unsecured email message. Wasn't overly surprised, but Bah. As an aside, the voice recognition software on their bill-paying service is excellent, except that it hasn't been set up to recognise the year 2006 as a possible "valid from" year for credit and debit cards, so you wind up talking to some underpaid eejit and bumping up their costs. Double bah.

[waidesworld.livejournal.com]

If it's one world alliance use American Airlines as your FF. You have three years of inactivity before your miles expire and if you are visiting the Motherland again you'll make some rapid progress in that field. I have used 350,000 airmiles over the last few years and still have about 200,000 left...but wait..they are still accumulating.

[waider.livejournal.com]

HAH.

Signed up no problem. However, the web form doesn't appear to recognise Aer Lingus as a member of the codeshare, and says of the other flights, "it appears you weren't an aadvantage member when you took these flights. talk to our customer service people."

Bah.