Need to get in touch with JetBlue‘s customer service team? Skip the phone call and open the airline’s app. Thanks to its partnership with customer service technology company Gladly, JetBlue now offers a fully integrated support chat option in its iOS mobile application. Android integration will go live in the coming weeks.
Gladly delivers a single interface for customer interaction across multiple channels. The company’s solution can integrate phone, text, chat, email, Tweets and Facebook messages into a unified display for the agents. Customers can switch platforms mid-conversation and the agent keeps the conversation thread in place, improving the support quality and reducing the time to resolution. The carrier previously implemented the phone and email portions of the Gladly service. This next step adds the chat service. Social media integration remains pending; Twitter remains a key communications channel that is not yet running on the Gladly platform for JetBlue.
Our partnership with Gladly has always been about meeting customers where they are, on any channel they chose. Whether that’s through voice, web chat, SMS or email, Gladly helps us stay true to our spirit of innovation and putting customers at the center of everything that we’ve done since our very first flight. We’re excited to extend the convenience for customers to chat with our team without ever having to leave our mobile app.
– Frankie Littleford, JetBlue VP Customer Support
While JetBlue does not disclose the overall time savings for the various integrations, it does anticipate that the program can, over time, contribute to a 20% shift in customer contacts from the phone to chats. That should also result in reduced call center costs, helping to deliver on the company’s cost cutting plans. It also should reduce the chances of a customer getting a different or better answer by playing call-agent roulette and calling in multiple times.
Integrating customer chat to the Gladly platform is only part of the company’s plan. JetBlue also intends to integrate the Gladly data into its flight attendant app. That integration is in testing and expected to expand to the entire operation in 2020. That will allow crewmembers to see more details about passengers, moving beyond just elite status to other things like whether recent flight interruptions have contributed to a worse experience, things that might be mitigated by a seat upgrade or complimentary cocktail on board.
Gladly is one of several companies supported by the JetBlue Technology Ventures operation. The corporate venture capital arm of the airline seeks companies that can help improve the airline’s operations, as well as potentially make money in the broader market.
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