What do people expect Disney's customer service to do? Take everybody's word that their FP+s disappeared? Especially on the most popular attractions? Give everyone who called, their desired FP+s? People could just makeup stories and just call customer service without even trying to make FP+s ressies through the system. They cant just overbook attractions. Then people would be on here complaining how long the FP+ lines were.
I know this isnt a popular thing to say but in IT, some problems are caused by the user. I am NOT saying that anyone who is claiming an issue caused it but still sometimes, people dont follow instructions and that causes issues.
Let's take one example…there was a poster on here a week or two ago who made a change to her package on the phone with Disney and lost all of her FPs.
She had to redo all of the work that she put in. Not sure if she got everything back. She lost all of that work because of Disney's faulty systems.
Anyway, when something like that happens, the first thing that should happen is that the case should be escalated to someone who can see and do more than the front-line CMs, whether in the park, hotels, or at home when you are planning. Instead, we know that Disney has cut back on those type of people in the parks anyway. Cheap.
Then, those representatives should work with people in IT (will probably also require more staffing) to figure out if FPs were indeed lost. If they were lost, then they should either be put back in, or there should be a package of "anytime" FPs waiting for the customer at the hotel upon check in. So that's just one example. If it can't be determined whether or not they were lost, then that representative should be empowered to make a call on how to handle the situation from a customer service perspective. Could be giving the FPs back, a gift card, whatever.
I'll give another example that follows the same pattern…when we were there in November, we couldn't get our room key on our MBs. We wasted two hours at the front desk. As soon as the front desk CMs couldn't figure it out after ten minutes or so, that should have been escalated to someone who could. In this case, we lost valuable vacation hours. I didn't ask for anything, but something should have been given out as a token, recognizing that they wasted our precious time.
Even before all of this, there is a very simple thing that can be done. It's the simple act of saying, "I'm sorry this happened." It's customer service rule #1. Studies have shown that even in cases of malpractice in medicine, medical professionals personally apologizing to patients can reduce malpractice lawsuits.
I've used this example on here before, but we were at Great Wolf last year, and a worker in food service was rude to me. I went to the general manager just to tell him, not looking for any compensation, just to vent honestly. He went into the back, came back out, apologized, and took 10% off our entire weekend stay. You can bet I walked away with a pretty good feeling about our trip there.