Working for a company that also has its call center operations in-house has it perks. It gives you the capability to experiment with different cross-channel initiatives. Though I am only involved in our company’s online operations, I am sometimes called upon to assist in different offline projects. In the process, I am able to gain a holistic view of how an online and offline campaign can go definitely wrong. Or right.

My first topic? How about the Philippine Airlines Real Deal promo nightmare I had to go through the other day.

Let me point out all of the things Philippine Airlines did wrong.

1. Bandwidth. Bandwidth. Bandwidth. - They sure had none of it on those promo dates. Unless they’ve run the same promo before, Philippine Airlines should have prepared for the unique visits they were going to get that night.
2. Ignore manpower issues - 30-minute waits for the lucky few who get through? Customer service is still a lot better than no customer service at all.
3. Lack of offline support - I heard Philippine Airlines ran a few ads in newspapers a day before the promo dates. Because of item #’s 1 and 2, they shouldn’t have.

Though Cebu Pacific’s regular Seat Sale is a tough act to follow, the Gokongwei owned company has been doing it long enough for most of their main competitors to end up doing the same. If you run any promo, and it makes a thousand people happy, but ends up making ten thousand decide not to patronize your service again, what will you do?

Consumer loyalty in this sector is one of the most important concerns any airline should try to improve and invest in. Henry Sy sure has his work cut out for him.

Let me tell you about the painstakingly difficult process we had to go through from April 27th to 28th.

Beforehand, we already knew it would be hard to get a transaction through, so I called Philippine Airlines’ 24-hour hotline to ask if it was possible to book on the phone, and pay for the ticket somewhere else. True enough, this “Real Deal” promo really was limited to online credit card purchases. I didn’t worry as much, because I didn’t think people would wait until 12 midnight.

Boy was I wrong.

As soon as 12 midnight hit, the simple ticket search on the Philippine Airlines’ Real Deal page was no longer loading. I clicked and refreshed the hell out of my browser, and nothing came out. On one of our sessions, we managed to get to the payment page, only to time out on the last confirmation page before the completion of the transaction. Oh, the frustration. Since the site had an error message telling us to not click on the submit button again (at the risk of charging the credit card twice), we were forced to email their customer service people to determine if the transaction went through. You can just imagine that we were probably one of the thousands who were doing the exact very same thing, at that same moment.

We decided to make the extra effort and call their 24-hour hotline. I am not kidding when I say this, but it took me probably close to a hundred redials just to get through (and that’s not counting the 30-minute wait before an operator finally picked up). What did the person on the other line tell me? That the transaction didn’t go through and that we should enter our credit card information again. Pffft. It was already 5am. I knew it was time to call it a night morning.

On around 10am of the same day, we decided to hold off on any more tries to purchase the ticket. By then, the email I was asked to send ask for confirmation of the purchase still didn’t have a reply, and I had already reached my yearly quota of busy signals and please try again laters. We had a few errands to run, so we ended up putting off the chase for a few hours.

While I was out, and since there was no hope getting through the local line, my fiancee decided to user her Yahoo voice account to call the Philippine Airlines 1-800 number. She waited for around 25 minutes, but at least she got through. It was then they told her that one of the purchases we were trying so hard to push for, had in fact gone through. Whew. After literally more than 24 hours of online frustration, this Philippine Airlines Real Deal promo finally decided to give us an effin’ break.

One ticket down, and another one to go.

By 12 midnight, I was again trying to access their site because I wanted to purchase a different ticket — this time for myself. This is what greeted me.

At that point, I told myself that I wasn’t going to subject myself to the same crap all over again. Also, I had something important to take care of in the morning. And so when I got to the office, I decided to try one more time.

Believe it or not, I made it to the last step. After the payment went through, I decided to call Philippine Airlines’ 1-800 number and they said they were just waiting for feedback from the bank. I sure hope all this trouble was worth it.

*Updated: An officemate sent me this following email. She received it from Philippine Airlines this morning.

Isn’t this what I tried to do in the first place?