How To Lose One of Your Best Customers

By popagandhi | Published: 17 October, 2007

I fly Jetstar many times a year, so many times that I forget the exact number. I’ll be flying them again to Taipei and Surabaya. They’ve always managed to give me good fares to the destinations I want to go, good service, on time performance — I fly them so much I ask for Jetstar vouchers for my birthday as I always need them at some point.

But really, Jetstar, your call centre sucks.

Press 1 for Jetstar Asia (2 for Valuair).
Press 1 for English.
Start bombarding me with a half a minute long recording of a message I am not particularly interested in, and have no option to kill.
Press 1 for booking, 2 and 3 for blahblahblahblah, 4 for “other travel enquiries”.

I wanted to ask someone about vouchers because the link from their site just brings up a blank page, and nothing’s been done about it.

So I press 4 for “other travel enquiries”.

“Did you know.. that you can find a wealth of information about Jetstar on w w w dot jetstar dot com? Thank you. Press hash to repeat this message”.

And they hang up. Not even the option to press anything to return to the menu. The machine just hangs up after telling you about the website. Wow, I didn’t need to take so many steps to find out about your website.

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  • Ack. Typo in the previous message, thus resulting in grammar problems. Oh well.
  • It's also prevalent with many of the voice response systems deployed by official organisations here. And I know of many older folks who were repelled by them. Thus, these organisations became unapproachable and distant.
  • This is a problem with almost every single big business I can think of here in the states. Long, annoying messages and a very, very long time before you can just ask someone a question and get it resolved. Sometimes you actually have to talk to a computer. If there's any background noise, she--the computer--will think you said something else and get all confused. It's crazy.
  • :) Jetstar isn't really a budget airline, and certainly isn't cheap. I'd gladly find another airline if they let me buy one way tickets.
  • Well I suppose you get what you pay for...
  • With Jetstar, I always choose "1" and then hijack the agent into answering whatever queries I have.

    I also generally press 0 on all systems just to see if I can get through to an Cust. Service Rep. without all those layers of menus.. it works surprisingly often.
  • This brings me to my gripe with my Starhub voice messages which goes something like:

    "Welcome to Starhub blah blah blah .... You have 1 new voice message. To listen to this message please press 1."

    After I pressed '1' I have to listen to 10 sec of: "Message Wednesday Seventeen October Two-Thousand Seven sent by XXXXXXXX" BEFORE I can even get to my message.

    Such a waste of time and $$$ (esp when I'm overseas)! Maybe that's another source of income for them!
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