Alaska Airlines Customer Service

When you call the customer service line for Alaska Air, you first interact with an automated messaging system. It thanks you for calling, says it records calls for quality purposes, and then offers a Spanish language option (press 2 for Spanish). Having an alternative language option is great! It increases caller accessibility and is greatly appreciated.

After these opening statements, you're not presented with a standard phone menu. Unfortunately (in my opinion), a voice-activated messaging system asks how it can help you. I really dislike voice-activated messaging systems; in my opinion, they're far too buggy to be as ubiquitous as they are. They never seem to properly understand you and operate slowly enough to be just the right amount of infuriating after maybe five minutes. You know what I mean? Never mind the fact that many people who are calling customer service lines in the first place are already frustrated and just want to speak to a real human being, not a half-functional AI system.

If you don't say anything when the system asks how it can help you, it says, "What can I do for you?" If you still don't say anything, it says we must have a bad connection, thanks you for calling, asks you to call again at a later time, and then automatically terminates the call. From a customer service standpoint, this is wild to me.

Typically, companies that use voice activation include keypad options to increase ease and accessibility; they will also often give you suggestions on what to say, to let you know what types of words or phrases are readily accepted and understood by the system. Alaska Air did neither; they simply asked an open-ended question in a few different ways, then gave up and ended the call.

I wasn't able to reach a representative. Generally, airline reps are really wonderful; I imagine Alaska Air's are as well. Too bad I didn't get to see for myself because of their buggy automated messaging system!