
JetBlue Founder’s New Airline Won’t Have Customer Service Phones - acdanger
https://thepointsguy.com/news/moxy-customer-service/
======
dabei
> "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.

~~~
nawitus
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.

~~~
swrobel
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.

~~~
samstave
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.

~~~
thatswrong0
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.

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

~~~
thatswrong0
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.

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andrew_
> “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.

~~~
kryogen1c
> > “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

~~~
paranoidrobot
> 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.

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AznHisoka
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.

~~~
booleandilemma
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?

~~~
the-dude
Dark patterns.

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jVinc
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.

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

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juped
>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).

~~~
bronco21016
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?

~~~
scintill76
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.

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ralmidani
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.

~~~
signal11
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.

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21
The cockpit of the Airbus A220 they bought is very interesting, 5 large touch
screens:

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/AirBalti...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/AirBaltic_Bombardier_CS300_mainenance_%2833221388195%29.jpg)

~~~
vermontdevil
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A220)

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tyingq
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.

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rayiner
> 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.

~~~
pedrogpimenta
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!"

~~~
rco8786
Well, the second one isn’t too crazy if someone was introduced to Amazon via
AWS and not amazon.com

~~~
Klinky
Who is hiring cavemen living under rocks as AWS developers?

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

~~~
dmurray
Amazon ships to "over 100 countries and regions"

[https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...](https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201910800)

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aestetix
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.

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grecy
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.

~~~
mikeash
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.

~~~
grecy
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.

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

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

~~~
mannykannot
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.

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milin
For god's sake, thepointsguy is horrible.

