To be fair, we don't know if the problem is being ignored, or just isn't in the current sprint.
Think about how this would go on your team. Customer service sends in a ticket to your Product owner, complaining that a customer has a problem, and called in not only reporting it, but telling you exactly what their expected fix was. Even if the team acknowledged the problem and wanted to fix it, would it really be bumped to the #1 priority, and would the team really just take the fix from the customer instead of designing their own solution?
Or would it be triaged and prioritized, taking into account all other product and customers needs at the same time?
I'm not arguing that airline customer service is great. But a post on stackexchange venting about a customer service team's lack of communication gives us zero insights into what is really going on.
The post said that it had been working fine for 6 years, and this is a new, recent bug. Or, more specifically, that the problem's workaround is no longer valid recently because of the new bug that requires longer names.
These PNRs are stored on mainframes running software written in COBOL which has not been touched for years. The actual PNR is a flat text document with semi-structured lines as explained in the article.
We never make changes to the mainframes, we just wrap the functionality. The structure of a line cannot change as the industry relies on all airlines using the same structure. If a new "field" needs to be added to the PNR we add it as an "RM" (remark) entry.
I dunno about you, but I always liked the practice of having an on-call rotation (even if you weren't actually on call) so someone would be able to pick up minor bug fixes without them getting in the forever backlog.
Think about how this would go on your team. Customer service sends in a ticket to your Product owner, complaining that a customer has a problem, and called in not only reporting it, but telling you exactly what their expected fix was. Even if the team acknowledged the problem and wanted to fix it, would it really be bumped to the #1 priority, and would the team really just take the fix from the customer instead of designing their own solution?
Or would it be triaged and prioritized, taking into account all other product and customers needs at the same time?
I'm not arguing that airline customer service is great. But a post on stackexchange venting about a customer service team's lack of communication gives us zero insights into what is really going on.