JetBlue Founder’s New Airline Won’t Have Customer Service Phones | Hacker News Reader

JetBlue Founder’s New Airline Won’t Have Customer Service Phones

thepointsguy.com

49 pointsacdanger66 comments

> "The app will take care of a lot of those pre-flight interactions"

It's easy to automate the happy path interactions. But it's impossible to enumerate and prepare for all the problems and particular situations the customers are in. (Anna Karenina Principle)

I guess their strategy is hope these problems doesn't happen that often and the consequence is not that severe.

The article states "There will be humans available, but the idea is that they’ll get in touch only in case of absolute necessity.".

I would imagine there is a way to open a direct chat with customer service in these cases.

As the guy who uses live chat first and foremost everywhere it’s available, I’m well aware that I’m getting a much lower level of service than I would on the phone just to avoid being on the phone with someone. The simple fact is that a person can only be on the phone with one other person at a time, but live chat reps can (and do) service many customers at the same time. Don’t kid yourself about his motivations for eliminating phone support.

Exactly.

Always remember that youre reading marketing fluff first. Be able to unpack the motivations behind the fluff and you find that money is the reason.

I actually don’t think this is the case for JetBlue - they’ve always been focused on providing good customer service. Customer service reps can address the 80% simple support cases more efficiently over chat than on the phone. You _could_ say that yes, efficiency is about the money, but really it’s a better experience for everyone involved (customer and service rep) to spend less time getting support.

Still, thats a rosey goal - I just have a cynical-pessimistic view on the actual outcome...

This is already a thing at JetBlue - they rolled out a chat widget on their website recently and it has reduced the number of incoming phone support requests. Their customer service reps working chat love it because they can help more customers in the same period of time. Even better is that if the rep still needs to talk with the customer over the phone to address an issue.. they can! The agent can just call the customer to address that 5-10% use case.

I don't foresee them getting rid of phone altogether.. _that_ seems rosey. But I certainly see a 95% chat / SMS future with voice only as strictly needed.

Perhaps, but I've always had much better service from live chat than from phone calls in practice. Plus, you never have to wait on hold with live chat...

Most importantly, you have written proof what they said.

Note that this says the opposite of you will be able to get in touch with them.

This might just be a case of the speaker not being precise, but even so, we can make a shrewd guess of the level of service we can expect, from other companies that have gone the minimal customer service route. Every couple of months, there's an article on HN about someone hitting a brick wall when dealing with a problem created by one of these companies.

By this time people will be absolutely frustrated. Not sure this is a great plan. Certainly not something a company that cares about customers would do. We shall see.

I tend to be more frustrated by having to call a company to handle some basic use case situation that could definitely have been handled by an algorithm, but was just not handled by their app/website.

It's simply the big business dream -- bait customers with low prices, and then ignore them when you violate your side of the contract, knowing they can't afford to fight.

They're going to end up getting a lot of snail mail that they can't ignore.

> “We all use Uber. We all use Amazon, right? How many of you have ever spoken to a human at Uber?”

Uber support via the app is absolutely horrendous. I do hope that's not being used as a model.

Best of Uber support:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/13/uber-fail... - I can't find the article, but one victim got the impression Uber would report the crime, but they simply didn't.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/01/uber-sexu... - the converse story!

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/15/uber-indi... - Uber executive gets medical records of rape victim.

Uber support was so inadequate, the licensing agency in London had to force them to run a 24/7 phone line.

> > “We all use Uber. We all use Amazon, right? How many of you have ever spoken to a human at Uber?”

> Uber support via the app is absolutely horrendous. I do hope that's not being used as a model.

The problem is not with the business model. My company resells AppRiver products like spam filtering, secure email, and email continuity. I suppose they have phones you can call, but I wouldnt know. Their chat-based tech support is simply hands-down the best tech support I've ever seen, phone or no-phone.

The quality of tech support is not causally related to the medium, although I would guess it's correlated due to cheap/worse companies with worse tech support picking cheap/worse chat-based tech support

> My company resells AppRiver products like spam filtering, secure email, and email continuity. I suppose they have phones you can call, but I wouldnt know. Their chat-based tech support is simply hands-down the best tech support I've ever seen, phone or no-phone.

I have to ask who the heck you're dealing with over at AppRiver because as someone who's been using AppRiver through $Reseller for years now, it's been damn near impossible to get anything done.

It took them nearly two months to finally acknowledge that we weren't incompetent idiots who didn't know how to use their portal, and that mail really was randomly going missing for weeks at a time and then showing up out of the blue.

Even when they did acknowledge it was a screwup on their end (some kind of crashed service on a couple of servers), their responses indicated they had no intention of adding any monitoring or ability for us to see that all the mailservers that handled our mail were actually online and working.

This is entirely aside from how atrocious their product is to use.

We're finally migrating to a competitor and while the experience hasn't been perfect, we already have a lot more confidence that things are working.

I'm going to suggest - and bear with me on this, I know it's a wild suggestion - that your company deals mainly with customer types who are used to doing a fair amount of typing, sitting at proper keyboards and such. That's probably not the average user profile for people who fly and take cabs, particularly at the point where problems arise.

The big difference is that I don't have to give Uber hundreds of non-refundable dollars weeks or months before I use their product.

And an Uber driver not showing up doesn't potentially cost me hundreds more in added hotel fees, as well as other inconveniences. ("Sure, I guess my 2 year old and I can just bum around the airport for another 12 hours until the next flight.")

"Flight hasn't shown up? Simply open the app to call your UberPilot™ and ask WTF?!"

I find airlines make it extremely easy to upgrade your flight, or anything that involves giving them your money. No need to talk to anyone - just press a button.

The minute you want to cancel something and get money back though, the more hoops you have to go through.

I’ve seen this dark pattern with everything from credit cards to newspaper subscriptions.

They intentionally make canceling a hassle when the technology is there to make it easy.

Is there a name for this?

Dark patterns.

Even New York Times, who holds itself as the smartest and most sophisticated people in the USA, sells subscriptions online but won't let people cancel a subscription without a phone negotiation.

Of course they do. What’s their incentive to allow cancelling online?

Being a company you'll want to do business with again in the future?

Just tried to do that - no way to upgrade a Swiss flight, only way was DM on twitter. That was unexpected

The next level disruption. Taking an industry that is known for absolutely horrible almost non-existing cupstormer service (for everyone not paying tons of extra money), and just remove the customer service entirely.

I'm sure he's heard tons of stories from other airlines spending a lot of money on difficult edge case support issues and just thought: "So basically people with large problems are calling our support staff by phone to resolve those issues..... I thing the phone line is the problem!"

I will say it's nice of them to be up front about it. That makes it easy to just add them next to Reyanair and Delta in the list of airlines I don't want to go into my search for tickets.

This sounds like a nightmare, people hate tech companies' customer service, it makes it nearly impossible for them to respond to unplanned for situations.

>To explain how much of a driving principle that is for him, he recalled an anecdote from the early days of JetBlue, when an experienced pilot with an enormous amount of flight time under his belt showed up for an interview. “He had 15,000 hours,” Neeleman said, “but when we asked him to tell us about one instance where he’d gone above and beyond, he couldn’t name it. So we didn’t hire him. Why? Because he was a jerk.”

I will never fly this airline, and will strongly reconsider flying JetBlue again, now that I've read this seriously damning admission (in the form of a brag).

I don’t follow why it was bad that they didn’t hire this pilot? All pilots, regardless of experience, are held to the same standard when it comes to doing the job of flying the plane. Now, given a pilot with 5,000 hours and a great customer friendly attitude and a pilot with 15,000 hours but a horrible attitude towards the customers, ya know those pesky people who pay the bills and salaries, which would you choose?

But why does being unable to tell an anecdote on the spot equate to having a "horrible attitude toward customers"? Maybe just a poor interviewer.

The Google-ification of everything...

Sometimes people in customer service need to hear a human voice to fully understand the frustration of trying to do things "right" in an often poorly-designed UI.

Ironically a friend who just bought a small business is struggling to contact Facebook because the small business page of the business he bought is inaccessible and Facebook has made it near-impossible to speak to a human about anything, even business-related.

So yeah, companies that want to make money without actually speaking to the people they serve -- stay miles away.

The cockpit of the Airbus A220 they bought is very interesting, 5 large touch screens:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/AirBalti...

For those who may not recognize A220, it’s tbe Bombardier C series that Airbus has a joint venture stake in. The one that Boeing tried to block from selling in the US

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A220

That's pretty typical of any modern glass cockpit plane. See the 787 cockpit for comparison: https://www.engadget.com/gallery/boeing-787-dreamliner-cockp...

This might work okay if it's coupled with policies that are very favorable to customers. Trying to make this work with things like bag fees or change/cancel fees seems hard. They do hint that irregular operations (regional snowstorms, etc) might require actual customer service.

> David Neeleman told attendees at a meeting in New York on Friday that Moxy’s mantra is “we’re just a technology company that happens to fly airplanes” — and that its customer experience will be “very high-tech, very high-touch.”

You can’t make this stuff up.

People love working with technology.

"I love this company's technology and as a plus I get some flights!"

"Amazon is such a great technology company. And I just found out they sell things online! Crazy!"

Well, the second one isn’t too crazy if someone was introduced to Amazon via AWS and not amazon.com

Who is hiring cavemen living under rocks as AWS developers?

Anyone who doesn't live in one of the 15 countries that Amazon retail operates? AWS is available almost everywhere.

Amazon ships to "over 100 countries and regions"

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

They are artisanl rocks crafted in small batch organic fair-trade volcanoes which offer micro eruptions to support sustainable all natural disasters.

Perhaps: exclusive use of an app could potentially weed out more difficult to service customers that drive up costs.

Some of the worst acting and complaining customers appear to use Twitter extensively (based on their posts) so I'm not sure it will be much of a barrier...

Users complaining on Twitter don't directly drain customer service resources.

Do you work in Support? They absolutely do, because twitter is basically the cheat code to "jump the line" in any support process because it's PR. CEOs and Execs don't jump into the support queue to read customer tickets (rightfully so), but they absolutely read twitter.

Quite a few companies' leaders attempted to re-imagine their business as such:

"We're not an X company, we're a technology company that just happen to do X"

Never bought into that BS. Never will.

More often than not, they just got an ecom presence now and/or in-housed some pedestrian software dev.

I think the airlines of 20 years ago just c̶a̶l̶l̶e̶d̶ sent an email asking for their ideas back.

I mean, people could book flights online and print boarding passes without interacting with a single customer service person on some BA flights in 1999, back when their budget competitors painted their telephone booking number on the side of the aircraft. And I don't think it was seen as a sexy innovation even then.

Can't think of any major airlines that don't offer you the opportunity to book, receive your boarding passes and preorder your lunch via their app, and I'm not sure not having other routes to access the same information in the event of your phone running out of charge is actually a selling point

> “we’re just a technology company that happens to fly airplanes”

What is he smoking? What’s the main application or use of their technology?

You raise money at higher valuation multiples if you can convince people you're a tech company.

Nice PR pitch to mask the real reason: it's cheaper to not have to pay real people to do the work when you can have a machine do it.

I always wondered why there are not airlines that offer no in-flight service of any kind.

I would love to fly to Australia without any hostesses or meals if it gets me a cheaper ticket.

Flight attendants are required for safety. They’re put to work serving passengers just because they don’t have anything better to do most of the time.

Lots of airlines don’t offer free meals. It’s uncommon (or nonexistant) on longer flights because it’s not reasonable to make people go without food for that long.

Thanks for the info.

> It’s uncommon (or nonexistant) on longer flights because it’s not reasonable to make people go without food for that long.

Like I said, I'd be happy to pay less to go without food for that long.

JetBlue Founder’s New Airline won't have me as a customer

Complete clickbait title — the airline will offer customer service through it's app, just not over the phone.

If you read beyond the first paragraphs of the article, you will see that the intent is to try to eliminate interaction with a thinking entity - for example:

And what if things go wrong, as for example happens during storms? “If there’s a disruption, we’ll send your new flight, and you can accept it.” There will be humans available, but the idea is that they’ll get in touch only in case of absolute necessity.

Note, in particular, "they’ll get in touch only in case of absolute necessity", not "you will be able to get in touch..." If you have a situation that they have not anticipated, or that they simply don't want to deal with, you're shit out of luck.

Only yesterday, I was faced with a schedule change due to weather, but the airline's messages about my options were ambiguous and incomplete, requiring me to speak to customer service - an option that I greatly appreciated.

I think the distinction is that it won’t just be typical customer service, where the customer speaks with a representative who can perform sophisticated actions on a user’s account. It’ll be much more self-serve, so the set of actions a passenger can take is much larger and covers a larger set of circumstances.

To me, that’s a pretty reasonable value proposition. Usually my flights are pretty low-hassle, but ~10% of the time there are problems/delays where I might want to make substantial changes, and ~1% of the time it’s an absolute nightmare that requires going through phone trees and talking with disinterested customer service reps at the airline counter.

I wonder if those long-tail customer service interactions actually cost airlines a significant amount of money, I.e. paying people to be on-call and available all the time to deal with massively inconvenienced travelers.

Thanks, we've added “Phones” to match the opening sentence of the article.

So, a chatbot?

For god's sake, thepointsguy is horrible.

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