res agents

[huettel]

Can anyone out there share stories about the pressures/mood/concerns about the future among workers at res centers?

I''m a reporter with the St. Petersburg Times in Fla. working on a story about the subject. I''ve been following the closures of centers by various airlines and heard anecdotal stories about longer hold times for customers and shorter call handle and call work times.

To some degree, this obviously is part of the overall story of industry downsizing. But I''m assuming it also has a lot to do with carriers trying to drive customers to Web sites (including messages while customers are on hold and running Web site addresses in ads instead of toll free res center numbers).

Any comments would be a great help, even if you don''t want your name used. If you''d prefer not to post, please send a private message or e-mail me at [email protected].

Thanks in advance for the help. I''ll post a link when the story runs later this month.

 

[Winglet]

Why don''t you write about 25% of airline employees being out of a job, about how when the economy comes back we''ll be 25% short of capacity and tickets will be hard to get and incredibly expensive . . . . in other words, why the aviation industry can''t survive wild swings in demand and still have a coherent national air transportation system.

 

[Segue]

The swings in demand occur in other industries, the diffence in the airlines is that there is zero scalability. 99% of your costs and capacity are outside of your control, including labor. You can scale down capacity to meet reduced demand, but your costs only come down by a fraction.