AirAsia needs to train their call center personnel more

Wedenesday, December 5th, 2007

as soon as I arrived at my beloved desk in the office, started daily routine, and got a delicious surprise. An e-mail from AirAsia with "The Real Deal!" as it's subject, for really cheap airfare, the fastest you book and buy, the lower price you get. For the last 3 months I've been dreaming and planning for a trip in May 2008, there's a perfect date that has a holiday on Tuesday, so it will cost me only 4 days of leave for a week trip. And this special rate they offer is for May6th - 25 Oct 2008, it's like screaming to me "Pick me!!!! Take meeeee! Buy meeee!!!!!!".

So, I called my friend, which I've been talking her in to taking the trip with me for the last month or so and we decided to buy the ticket. After checking the prices, we got the lowest fare they offer and with the dates we planned to go. OK, so the route and flight itinerary of our trip is done, time to do the booking and buy it online.
Done some bookings, as usual it requires some information of us, and all are in the same type of formats. Until 1 for one of our flight information requirement format is different than the other ones I've done.

To tell you the truth, I'm more of a traditional person for online payment, I know that it's not really save doing online payment, so I'm really really precocious about doing it. And when I found something weird, usually I just make a phone call to the company's call center or my credit card call center, to make sure that everything is ok and they really responded nice and professional.

And called the AirAsia call center I did, my call was picked up by a call center personnel named Vita. I told her what my doubt was for the online formats and I don't want to have a problem because of this at the time of my trip. Her respond quite surprised me, besides having a rude tone, she didn't say yes or no for what I was asking or confirming, she responded just with an "uh...huh", as long as I've known this was not a standard procedure for a call center personnel to handle phone call. The good thing is she tried to ask another person for my question, I appreciate that from her. While on hold, I was thinking maybe..... she was rude because I was calling her out of her office time and she picked up my call out of her personal favor (I called at around 7 PM), so when she got back to me and gave her info that the format is like that and that it's ok, I asked her what is the office hour for the call center, and it's until 9 PM. So... I'm still calling in their office hour, she doesn't have an excuse for being rude.
After all information I needed is done, before ending the call I told her that I have an input for her that she should be more polite in handling phone calls from customers.

This is my first experience on having a rude call center personnel from AirAsia, so I'm not telling that everybody is like that, because I've made some calls to them previously and I've never had this kind of a problem.
I just think that AirAsia needs to give more training to their call center personnel for politeness and professionalism on their job.
Up until now besides that incident, I'm still quite satisfied with their services.