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

by bsmith 8y ago

smnrchrds 8y ago
So, a chatbot?
mannykannot 8y ago
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.
sctb 8y ago
Thanks, we've added “Phones” to match the opening sentence of the article.
beisner 8y ago
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.

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

by bsmith 8y ago

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

smnrchrds 8y ago

So, a chatbot?

mannykannot 8y ago

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.

sctb 8y ago

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

beisner 8y ago

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.