Pretoria - “My frustration boileth over!” So began Joburg businessman Harry Herber’s e-mail to me a week ago, about his experience with SAA’s loyalty programme, Voyager.
By the time he sat down to bash out an e-mail to Consumer Watch, he’d been trying to access his Voyager account in order to make a booking for four weeks.
“For the first two weeks, no form of communication I tried got a meaningful response, apart from them giving me a new pin number that doesn’t work, nor was it asked for,” he said.
“Phone calls are met with ‘we don’t know…’ or ‘We have no e-mail address in order for you to escalate the problem’ or ‘IT is in India, so we can’t contact them’.”
That last response is just too ridiculous for words.
Two weeks into Herber’s ordeal, a notice appeared on Voyager’s website: “Voyager log-in issues are receiving urgent attention. We are aware of the problems some of you are encountering when trying to log into your accounts. The matter is receiving our urgent attention and will be resolved in due course.”
“Well, two weeks have since past and still no resolution, so obviously their sense of urgency and mine differ vastly,” Herber said.
“This is our national carrier, which we hold up as a mirror of the country to the outside world. It’s a joke, a disgrace, a farce and total incompetence,” he said.
Harsh words, yes, but after four weeks of stonewalling, that’s understandable.
So I turned to Voyager’s commercial manager, Beulah Els, for answers.
“We confirm that an issue has been identified which has impacted the log-in process of a number of Voyager members where the profile display experiences a time-out on flysaa.com,” she said.
“This inconvenience was addressed immediately which resulted in the core problem being identified and a fix applied and we are currently in the process of ensuring the internal processes are amended and tested to restore the functionality and to prevent further impact.
“In an effort to keep our most valued customers informed, we have created a pop-up message alerting those members who are experiencing the problem and redirecting them to the Voyager call centre for immediate assistance.
“We regret this temporary inconvenience,” Els said, adding that it should be sorted out soon and that she hoped Herber “has been contacted in the interim to be assisted with his booking”.
No, he wasn’t, and he didn’t seem at all surprised. In fact, he’d made a booking on British Airways instead.
The log-in problem was indeed sorted out at the weekend, and Herber was contacted, and received an apology for the lapse in service and the inconvenience he experienced.
He forwarded me an e-mail he’d received from a Voyager member relations consultant, vowing to listen to all the recordings of his calls with Voyager staff, and read the e-mail exchanges, “to enable further investigation and to also assist in identifying a lack of training to allow us to enhance our service to all members and to ensure that this does not reoccur”.
And as a “gesture of goodwill” Voyager loaded 87 300 miles to his account – enough for one flight to Europe.
He accepted, with thanks, but made the point that with more than 850 000 miles already accumulated on his account, plus an unused companion reward, he’d not been after any “reward” when he wrote to Consumer Watch, just “some sort of service”.
“Service excellence is really what it’s all about in today’s commoditised marketplace.”
The “inconvenience” was not addressed by Voyager immediately; far from it.
Herber wasn’t the only Voyager member battling for days and in some cases weeks to redeem their miles online.
A service failure coupled with a communication failure is guaranteed to dent, if not destroy, customer loyalty. - Pretoria News