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Sunday, October 16, 2011

Inside Delta Air Lines Customer Care


Part 2

In our last installment, Alice (our hypothetical disgruntled traveller), had written to Delta to (allegedly) claim that she had been totally screwed-over. 

We pick up the story ...

Her letter arrived in Atlanta. Alice visualized that her letter would be read by a perky, smiling brunette intern (named Peaches; she has pictures of her kitten and boyfriend on the walls of her cubicle .. drives a Camry), who would immediately recognize Delta's wrong-doing, and correct the error.

But the sheer size of Delta's operation prevents this. They are getting (an estimated) 125,000 complaints every day. So what happens is that one of 27 illegal aliens (unconfirmed) employed by Delta opens each letter and feeds it into a device called an "Optical Character Recognition Scanner." The process converts scanned images of machine-printed or handwritten text into a computer-processable format.

Alice's letter is then transmitted to India using a constellation of Iridium satellites such as this one :

                            

Arriving in India, her letter is sent to the mainframe of Delta's Customer Care Global Data Center (that we think might be) located on the second floor of the building to the right in this picture :


                            

The computer's custom software extracts the usual keywords such as, "rip-off," lied,"  "misleading," and "larceny," from Alice's letter, and matches it to one of 2 or 3 prefabricated "personal responses."

In our next episode, we'll introduce you to, "Diana P. Coster." She's a Delta Customer Care Coodinator that DOESN'T EXIST.

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