The Navigator: in United-Continental Airline Merger, A Chaotic Computer Change

But when the madness afflicting United in March has taught passengers something, it is that there are some airline issues you simply cannot plan for. The lead players in United’s IT drama are two reservations systems that handle capabilities from ticketing to loyalty applications. A mixed US Airways-American Airlines, which some trade watchers are predicting, is a possible candidate. At United Airlines, they referred to as it the “cutover.” It was the ultimate and most difficult piece of the puzzle in the merger with Continental Airlines (Go At this site), and it concerned combining two complicated passenger reservations programs. Their free-checked-baggage allowance was additionally cut from two luggage to at least one, generating more complaints to United’s call centers and straining the airline’s assets. United’s was known as Apollo; Continental’s was Shares. Shares began to slow under the burden of the additional transaction requests, resulting in more timeouts and system freezes than United had anticipated. Although that was a temporary setback – United plans so as to add a more consumer-pleasant interface by the tip of the 12 months – it combined with the just lately migrated passenger reservations system and the new guidelines to present United and its clients a March they’d reasonably neglect.

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One of many crucial choke factors proved to be the airport brokers, whose programs essentially had been downgraded from a degree-and-click on interface to one which accepted only text-primarily based line commands. And airport agents powering up their workstations had been greeted by a Shares log-in screen, a system that half of them hadn’t used in an actual-world setting. United selected to use Shares shortly after merging with Continental, and late on the evening of March 2, nearly a yr and a half after the consolidation grew to become official, it completed the process of combining Apollo and Shares by copying the information on both systems, backing it up after which consolidating it. Final October, his department began training brokers in how to use Shares and briefing them on United’s new policies. John Buckholz, a planning supervisor in Ogdensburg, N.Y., spent greater than three hours on the phone making an attempt to cash in a present certificate, which involves extra steps and normally takes longer on Shares than it did on Apollo. “Handle” times – the length of time it takes to resolve a buyer inquiry – jumped one hundred twenty %. They complained about delayed flights, sluggish customer service response times and rude treatment by overwhelmed ticket brokers struggling to study a new computer system. Its all-vital handle occasions have been lower in half, to an average of 10 minutes, which is sort of back to regular.

“Things have labored very slowly,” the agent mentioned, begging her to stay patient. That manner, if their itinerary disappeared into the electronic ether, an agent would have a place to begin for finding it. A few days into the cutover, nevertheless, it was clear that issues weren’t going effectively from a buyer-service perspective. United says that the scenario has calmed and that it’s taking steps to maintain issues going easily. “We thought it was sufficient,” he says. United says that it didn’t completely lose any reservations through the transition and that every itinerary, together with Shevchuk’s and Talcott’s, was finally tracked down. However many passengers didn’t know about the cutover, or its probable implications, till it was too late. Sergei Shevchuk, a analysis scientist in San Francisco who tried to cellphone the airline – how you can help – in the course of the cutover, additionally grew more and more frustrated. Between now and June, the provider is hiring another four hundred contact center workers, including to the staff of 6,300 workers who reply passenger inquiries by way of phone and e-mail. It employed four hundred new name middle brokers and recalled nearly 300 furloughed staff. He’d canceled a ticket just earlier than the change, and when he referred to as to search out out about his refund, agents provided conflicting solutions, first saying that his ticket wasn’t refundable and then that they couldn’t discover his reservation.

’s customer service group averted a disaster that might have inconvenienced even more passengers.

Name volumes surged from 1.5 million the week before the cutover to 2 million the week of the swap, exceeding what managers had deliberate for by 10 percent. That, in flip, lengthened the call wait queue. Decrease-tier elite-stage passengers may not get upgraded to United’s premium economic system class when they reserved their tickets; they had to attend till the day of their flight to secure their Financial system Plus seat assignments. On one other degree, United’s change can be a case research in how cautious planning by the airline’s customer service group averted a disaster that might have inconvenienced even more passengers. He’s United’s senior vice president for customer experience. Hand says that United began growing the customer service strategy for the cutover earlier than the airlines merged. Kathy Talcott, a United passenger who’d been ready since January for a promised refund, obtained an e-mail from a customer service manager who blamed the cutover for the delay. My e-mail in-field was filling up rapidly with United queries. “My e-mail quantity was up by about 10,000 percent,” he informed me.