OMAAT readers share a lot of stories with me, and some of them are pretty wild. Well, Michael just shared an experience with me that might just be the most unusual one that I’ve ever heard. I can’t imagine it’s made up, but it’s also so shocking that I struggle to wrap my head around this.
Is this the wildest American Airlines phone interaction ever?
Let me share the email that Michael sent me, in its entirety:
Long time reader who is so flabbergasted by an interaction with AA last night that I thought that I needed to reach out to share it and see if you had any ideas on additional action I should take.
Last night I called AA (I’m an Executive Platinum) and was connected to someone named Kevin at the EP Desk in Dallas. I was calling because I needed to apply multiple trip credits to a trip for me, my wife, and my daughter. After I shared who I was booking for, he asked if I was planning on having any additional children. That by itself is an obviously inappropriate question for an agent to be asking me, but after I said, “no, we were done having children,” he told me that I needed to listen to God and have more children, and he quoted scripture to me about being fruitful and multiplying!
How dare he! He has no earthly idea what my personal circumstances are with regard to child bearing or religion. I stayed calm in the moment and simply stated that what he had said was extremely inappropriate, and moved on to complete the booking, but I am absolutely appalled.
After I finished with him, I submitted negative scores on the automated survey, and tried to figure out how to submit a customer service complaint. Online, the form doesn’t have a place to submit complaints about customer service disconnected from a flight. So, I called back to see what to do. The next agent I spoke with directed me to submit feedback to [email protected]. I did and received an automated message saying that that email address was not monitored by AA. So, I called back today and was directed to a “high value customer” number, which I was told conspiritorily was not supposed to be handed out. When I called that number, it was disconnected and no longer in service.
I know AA has disinvested in their customer service over the years, but this whole sequence is just ridiculous. What do you think?
I followed up with Michael to ask if there was any further context for this interaction:
There was absolutely no other context… it was completely out of the blue. I finished providing everyone’s AAdvantage numbers, he made some comment about how great it was that my six year old daughter had PreCheck, and then asked if I was going to have more children. So weird.
My take on this bizarre American Airlines interaction
If I just read this story online from some anonymous account, I’d assume it wasn’t real, because it’s that unbelievable. However, Michael has been a reader for close to a decade (based on looking at his commenting history), so I assume he’s being honest with what he shares, and has no reason whatsoever to make this up. Fortunately calls are recorded, so American should be able to verify this pretty easily.
I’ve honestly never in my life heard anything like this before, so I’m just shocked. Does the phone agent do this every time he works on the reservation of someone who has a kid, or was he just having a particularly “spiritual” day? Come and think of it, this did happen on a Sunday evening, so I almost wonder if he heard something in church that day, or…
Michael also raises a good point about how hard it can be for even American’s top tier elite members to provide feedback in a meaningful way. He’s right, when you go to American’s website and try to submit a complaint, there’s no option to provide feedback for a phone interaction.
Personally, I would’ve probably just submitted feedback under one of the other categories, and hoped it still gets directed to the right person. Unfortunately given the extent to which American has automated its customer relations, I wouldn’t necessarily expect it to be taken very seriously, though.
What would I otherwise do in this situation, if I wanted to be sure the experience was actually noted?
- You could reach out to media or share the story online, as Michael did
- You could email a senior American executive in hopes that the complaint would then be forwarded to the appropriate person; the email format is typically [email protected]
Bottom line
An American Airlines phone agent reportedly told a customer that he needed to have kids for God, after he tried to get help for a family reservation. I can’t imagine calling and having that “deep” of a conversation while working on an airline reservation, especially with no further context.
What do you make of this strange American interaction?