We all love to complain about air travel. And thanks to technology, there are increasingly more places than ever to scream into the void. But the surfeit of technology platforms can make it difficult for airlines to track and address complaints. One airline thinks it has a solution. Starting this year, JetBlue is overhauling its customer service operations to integrate more modern communication channels like email, SMS text messages, and even Twitter and Facebook. And its doing it by adopting a new software platform that consolidates all these channels into a single feed.
The airline is partnering with a startup called Gladly, which provides a spiffier, more modern looking web app for customer service operations. Its also investing an undisclosed sum into San Francisco-based firm through its venture capital arm. Using Gladly, JetBlue will be able to track customer emails, phone messages, and texts, as well as tweets and Facebook Messenger conversations, all without having to rely on the old system of case and ticket numbers.
"Seventy-one percent of customers use at least three channels to communicate," Frankie Littleford, a co-founder of JetBlue and the airline"™s vice president of customer support, told The Verge. "Gladly is going to take all of those communications and consolidate it into one platform. So instead of our crew members today having to have multiple applications open, toggling between screens, and maybe because of inactivity being logged out of one application and having to log back in and piece things together, this tool brings everything into one view in one application»…
