Sure, Alaska Listens, But do they Care?
After nearly 4 years of living in Seattle and flying Alaska Airlines almost exclusively, here are a few of my thoughts when it comes to their customer service.
Among the many things I like about Alaska, like their delivering a pizza to my house, or their awesome 20-minute bag guarantee, or their giving away thousands of free flights, there’s one thing I love the most above all. That one thing is the way they have treated me since the first time I flew them. It is almost… familial, in the same way you feel when you visit your grandma, who gives you cookies and tells you how thin you look even when you’ve put on 20 pounds in the past six months.
Alaska Air Listens Survey
I got to Gold 75K with them shortly after we moved to Seattle since we travel a lot just enough. The treatment kept getting better as I went up the elite levels. And I don’t mean just the treatment onboard. Their customer service call center, especially the dedicated 75K line, is very responsive and quite useful. Whether you need to correct a name on your reservation, or you totally screwed up you whole family’s tickets and need help to sort it out. They talk to you as a human being and are willing to put their best foot forward, fully explain, and even sometimes make exceptions that other companies wouldn’t.
It’s a level of service I love and have come to expect every time I interact with any Alaska Air employee. It is the level of service that sets our own organic, non-GMO, free range, cage-free Alaska apart from other more ‘corporate’ airlines.
So why am I always frustrated after filling out an Alaska Listens survey?
It occurred to me to go back to some of the emails I have received from their customer service center to try to figure it out.
Disclaimer: I’m only including some examples here and this isn’t the totality of my exchanges with them. I have filled out plenty of Alaska Listens surveys with excellent feedback, for which no followups were required. I don’t want y’all to think all I do is bitch even if it feels that way sometimes 🙂
- After submitting an Alaska Listens about a really rude flight attendant in First Class:
Alaska Listens Templated Response
- After submitting an Alaska Listens about my eternal struggle with them serving 50 shades of chicken and not offering their fruit and cheese platter as a free option in First.
Alaska Listens Templated Response
- After submitting an Alaska Listens survey about their Gogo service being unavailable during the whole flight, as well as their Beyond entertainment system and not having tablets on offer.
Alaska Listens Templated Response
All of them contain the following phrase or a very slight variation of it:
By taking the time to contact us and giving us your feedback, you have not only given me the opportunity to hear your concerns, but also an opportunity to be proactive in preventing a similar situation from occurring again.
This frustrates me like nothing else. Should it frustrate me? Probably not, but like I said, I have come to expect a certain level of service in every interaction, and a templated copy-paste response is anything but. It tells me that, although I have taken the time to contact them and give them my feedback, they have decided to pass on the opportunity to provide the same excellent level of customer service I, and many others, have come to expect and that truly does set them apart from their competition.
January 30, 2018
I am also a mvp gold 75 and have zero problem with the response you received from Alaska. You would probably not have even received a response from the big 3 let alone a 50 voucher. Be grateful for the service they provided in these three examples. Asking for perfection is an unrealistic expectation.
January 30, 2018
Actually, I don’t think it’s unrealistic to expect customer service not to use the same copy pasted template for over 4 years. The reason the big 3 get away with doing that is because people expect them to suck. I refuse.
January 30, 2018
MVP Gold here. Love Alaska, as do you. My take: Alaska has spoiled you rotten. 🙂
January 30, 2018
I don’t see how that is a bad thing 🤷🏻♂️
It speaks highly of them that I’ve come to expect nothing but the best 👌🏻
January 30, 2018
When dealing with a corporate being “email, survey, rep” I don’t expect anything more than “we’ll look into it”. I feel the same when I complain about my local Starbucks or Target when they fall short of what I expect. i wish there was a better way to pinpoint poor performance but I haven’t found it yet.
January 30, 2018
The only way to curb poor performance is to accept nothing short of excellent and let corporate beings know about it. When customers are complacent, we give them the space to half-ass their service. 😕
January 30, 2018
About two years ago, I complained to Alaska Airlines about being tossed around their phone tree and being put on hold forever trying to get the PIN on a gift certificate. They gave me a $50 flight credit and I have no status with the airline.
January 30, 2018
Nobody likes reading template replies. But how many different ways can you write the same two sentences so that it seems unique to hundreds or thousands of people? And what’s the value in crafting the same two lines in a thousand different ways?
I’m not in customer service but I have to e-mail too… same thing… all the time. I understand the use of those templated lines.
January 30, 2018
Zero. You literally need to write those two sentences zero times, since they add no value whatsoever to the interaction. Customer service agents should be trusted and empowered to deliver the same idea in their own words, just like they do over the phone.
January 31, 2018
umm… they have scripts on the phone. “same idea in their own words”… how many times… they are dealing with the same problems for hundreds of people. it WILL be the same because you cannot come up with a unique response hundreds of times.
you’re a blogger… got any templates? I hope we’re seeing 100% uniquely crafted stuff… made from scratch every single time! 😀 I mean, you do write the html from scratch, right!? 😀
January 31, 2018
I really can’t speak for the normal line, but they do not have scripts on the 75K line. They may have prompts, but they have perfectly normal conversations that in no way follow a script. You do this every day when you interact with other people and talk about the same things without actually repeating the same verbiage.
I invite you to keep reading our blog, where you will find that all of our posts are made with organic, small-batch content that is free of templates 🙂 Thanks!
January 31, 2018
Working for a large corporation one of two things is likely with this. Most likely they have had a management requirement to respond with a set verbage to avoid a low level CSR telling you something off message. Like what if they responded with “oh gosh that’s terrible ya’ll shouldn’t have ever had issues” sounding unprofessional or how about “tough luck on your first world problem, here in my 3rd world call center country we eat rats for dinnner” or whatever. The other thing is that just because this isn’t genuine sounding it doesn’t mean that a higher up manager doesn’t read your comments later. I’m not trying to defend this action because I hate it also but they deal with huge volumes of comments daily and want to respond quickly.
January 31, 2018
That’s my point. If you trust and empower your customer service employees to represent all the values of your company, you do not need unnecessary, insincere-sounding scripts that are a complete 180 from your company’s usual level of service.
July 7, 2018
I’m a 75K annually as well. I’ve actually experienced something slightly different. I expect great service and 99% of the time Alaska team achieve. The 1% of time this doesn’t occur I typically provide feedback. They have universally responded with personalized responses. In fact they typically offer me points or a small credit. I’ve had to tell them that I would prefer to decline the offer as my intent was to improve their team members as constructive feedback and not as a criticism. I’m extremely thankful for Alaska providing direct service for me and my wife and young daughter (they are both Gold annually as well) to permit me to work in the Midwest and live in Seattle.
July 9, 2018
Usually the responses are quasi-personalized, so if you’re getting a different treatment then that’s awesome. I was surprised that it was the same stock message for over 3 years. Glad they treat you well, they take care of us as well. It’s why we’re always going to fly with Alaska!
February 13, 2021
I know this is 2 years late, but time is weird on the internet. I 100% agree with you Ben! I worked in customer service – creating it – and customers notice the little things – even if u don’t think they do. Having a template of any sort can hurt Alaska Airline’s image to their customers. So if they really want to be the biggest (bigger) airline, and they claim that customer service is their differentiator in the market – then they better put extra money into making that true. That might be listening to their customers when they say they don’t appreciate email templates, and hiring some more agents that take more time to write fewer emails.
But that’s up to Alaska Airlines and Ben is just trying to help them do well so they will stay around.