Gemma Flint is quite a legend at American Airlines. No other customer service agent has been able to respond to as many passenger complaints as she has. And she works around the clock too. But as One Mile At A Time found out, she has a dark secret.
Meet Gemma Flint, The Busy Beaver At American Airlines
If you have received a complaint response from American Airlines, there is a good chance it was signed by Gemma Flint. In fact, if you complained about an operational issue (like a flight delay), your letter likely looked like this:
Thank you for contacting us.
I’m truly sorry to hear about your experience. It is always our goal to run a timely and reliable operation, and we are sorry to see we missed the mark on your trip. We’re paying careful attention to the feedback our customers are providing us and the details you shared with us have been made available to our leadership to be used to improve our service.
As an AAdvantage® member, your business means a great deal to us, and we’d like to ask for another chance to rebuild your confidence. As a tangible form of our apology, we’ve deposited miles into your AAdvantage® account. These miles will be visible within 24 hours.
From all of us at American Airlines, we’re glad you chose to fly with us and look forward to caring for you on your next journey.
Gemma Flint
And if you complained about something else, it looked like this:
Thank you for contacting American Airlines.
We strive to put our customers at the center of everything we do. The details you provided highlight the importance of that focus, and we are sorry to hear things did not go as planned.
Please know that we strive to learn from every experience, so we appreciate you taking the time to share your feedback with us. Your input will be shared with our team as we continue towards our goal of providing a world class experience.
Thank you again for reaching out to share your experience with us. We hope to better deliver on our high standard of excellence next time we have the opportunity to welcome you aboard.
Gemma Flint
So what’s the secret to Gemma Flint’s prolific productivity? She’s a bot. These letter responses are auto-generated.
And suddenly it all makes sense why every complaint into American Airlines appears to be answered in the same vague manner.
OMAAT offers further insight in that only complaints about operational issues result in compensation. 10-minute delay? Here are some AAdvantage miles. Mold all over your food on a paid first class ticket? We take your feedback seriously (but no compensation).
It is only when you respond back to these auto-generated notes that a real human will look at your issue. It’s like the old automatic denial insurance game…
Of course, this creates great stress for human beings who are still working in customer service at American Airlines, because they receive follow-up notes from enraged customers not only upset about the underlying incident, but enraged that the first response seemed to blow off their concerns due to its lack of specificity.
The good news for AA is that AI will continue to develop such that custom letters written about as well as a human can will soon be possible (and probably already are). The bad news is that for now, you must realize that AA takes your complaints so seriously that a bot reads and responds to them…
CONCLUSION
We now have the answer as to why it seems that every single response from American Airlines is the same. That’s because IT IS THE SAME and was written by the same source, a bot who goes by Gemma Flint.
To Care For People On Life’s Journey…
image: generated via Wonder AI with the prompt “American Airlines customer service employee”
so should we be complaining about every AA flight we take and banking the free compensation?
That risks being classified as a chronic complainer.
Alaska Airlines doesn’t seem to use a bot or has a better partial bot system. About 3 years ago, I got, as compensation, a discount code of $200 off a future flight, which I valued at $150-250. This was acceptable to me but may not be if a passenger only flies Alaska Airlines once every 5 years.
About 20 years ago, American Airlines completely destroyed luggage and said it was only worth $25. That led to a 10 year partial boycott of AA and possibly loss of revenue from 150 AA flights.
Reminds me of a story my grandfather retold about the Pullman train car company:
A lady who had recently traveled in a Pullman carriage complained to the company about bites she attributed to bedbugs. The Pullman company replied to her letter apologizing for the incident, but claimed that they had never had a complaint about bedbugs in the past. That wouldn’t have been noteworthy except for the fact that the clerk tasked with handling the mail forgot to remove the memo paperclipped to the complaint that read “Send her the bedbug letter.”
Same shit, different era.
Can a bot have gender?
This bot is ambiguously diverse. New times.
You look like a fool
So basically a cheaper way to say nothing. Because, that’s what the humans did as well.
What amazes me is how companies fail to understand that these bot letters actually make things worse.
If you write to a large company to complain it’s not shocking that you might be ignored. But when they send you a letter that makes utterly clear that they received your complaint and are totally ignoring it that’s infuriating. They frankly would be much better off not responding at all vice sending these bot letters.
I once had a long standing issue with my bank with no resolution in sight.
Therefore, I wrote a letter directly to each “external” director of the bank. With a bit of Googling , I got the business address of the company as listed on their profiles on the bank’s “leadership” web page. In some cases, the photo on the bank web page was the same as shown on their business web page.
The kick off paragraph read to the effect:
“I must apologize for writing this letter to each external director. However, I am unable to get customer satisfaction from those who work within XYZ bank.”
NOTE: I also included the name of the bank employee who was giving me the run around with her glib responses.
For something that dragged on and on for over 90 days, the issue was resolved in less than 9 days. You may think that I was burning my bridges, but my level of frustration was sky high with a bank that I’ve had an account with since 1980!!!
The Doug Parker legacy of “The Customer Comes Last” is simply ingrained in everything that AA does.
I love Genma.
This bot is probably AA’s most human employee.
Haven’t met her yet, but will mark her as junk mail in my account.
Yeah