[ollsen]

Having gone through various rounds of calls with Swiss I escalated my issue to Swiss CEO Thomas Kluehr and his CCO Markus Binkert by email. Subsequently a person from the Core Customer Care team called with a very rude and unfriendly attitude, only to make accusations and putting me and the travel agency at fault. She even accused me of not having picked-up the phone although she tried to call me multiple times. A solution to my ask has not been offered so far. To make it worse the Swiss PREMIUM Customer Care team wrote that they will not do anything and that it was alone my fault. I'm attaching the official answer from Swiss.

Case Summary:
I booked a SIA code-share flight operated by Swiss through a travel agent (a normal procedure, one would think). Subsequently I wanted to reserve the seats on the swiss.com websites as instructed by the travel agent and SIA. That however is not possible ("seat selection not available").
So I firstly posted a question on their FB page, which quickly escalated and peaked in Swiss not responding anymore. So I called the Swiss Customer Care hotline in Zurich and asked for the seats to be reserved. The call center agent declined to do that, claiming that the seat map is blocked for all code-share flights and that they could not do anything due to technical reasons (Swiss uses the Amadeus Altea system).
With that I called the travel agent once again and they ensured me that Swiss is indeed 1) able and 2) obliged to reserve the seats at this point in time - especially also given that I'm happy to pay for the seat reservation ($160.-).
And so it goes ping-pong ever since without Swiss offering any solution whatsoever.
Writing to Swiss CEO, CCO, BoD and even the DLH CEO is not doing anything. Not even triggering a short response from any of the addressee's - and hence showing a complete lack of responsibility and customer care.
Swiss is apparently, as sadly very often described in this and many other forums/websites, averse to customer service; both on the ground and air. Customers must be looked at as simply a requirement to make money - like a cow that they can milk. Ironically though they have not even mastered the milking, most likely due to the lack of creativity, customer affinity and empathy, and an overwhelmingly present arrogance. What the so called top management exemplifies is what customers experience through the Swiss staff - grumpy staff, lousy service (a complete lack of, rather). The values Swiss promotes on their website are purely there because they need to be there. They are neither lived nor reflected in anyway in the Swiss company culture nor their service. What a stark contrast to modern, customer affine companies like SIA, IKEA, Tesla, Apple etc.