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Comment by nawitus | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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