Paperless Customer Journey – JetBlue Deviceless Boarding
JetBlue Biometrics – Innovation and Disruption
This year, JetBlue entered the ranks of the innovators who disrupt industries by applying customer experience technology. They not only imagine the future. They build it. With award winning facial recognition boarding technology JetBlue previews the future of travel.
So the fact that JetBlue’s facial recognition trial was named as one of the 100 greatest innovations of 2017 by Popular Science is a major signal to the airline showing how excited the public is about innovation in the airline space. JetBlue realized customers are not just ready. Indeed, they are eager to step into a world of new experiences that are personal, helpful, and simple.
So, why is it so hard to eliminate friction points on the travel journey and enable repeatable, intuitive, and empathetic experiences when we fly?
Variability is almost impossible to manage
In the book “Uncommon Service” Frances Frei and Anne Morriss lay a whole customer management process for successful brands. They present several examples of Progressive Insurance and Shouldice Hospital. Through different processes these organizations are able to select the right customers for the experiences they built. Airlines cannot do that. An airline can’t choose who to fly. Since the industry is driven by small margins, every customer flown counts.
JetBlue’s mission to bring humanity back to air travel drives the company to welcome on board anybody who would like to fly. All our products and experiences are designed with that in mind!
Integrated experiences are based on integrated technologies
The future of flying is here only if we are able to integrate virtual reality, biometrics, and other technologies in a meaningful way that adds value. JetBlue collaborated with JetBlue Technology Ventures and Strivr to test VR for training of maintenance crewmembers. The technology is more advanced in helping with decision making and not necessarily recreating the feeling of loading bags under the plane.
For those immersive experiences, the integration, build and scaling of the experiences is much more complex. Integrated and intuitive experiences are not hard to imagine. They are complex to create and personalize.
For JetBlue Biometrics and other Technologies, Somebody has to pay for it
The moment we begin scaling and implementing customer journeys that use technologies of the future, we have to build the business case and its ROI. CFOs see customer experience design projects as process effectiveness work that increases output of existing infrastructure.
Customer experience is much more than that, of course. But knowing your audience is half the battle. Regardless of whether you agree with finance, you need the funding they hold. If you list the funding and maintenance requirements for a VR or a biometric solution very quickly you will see that to extract value from future technologies, you also need other future technologies to be cheaper. We all depend on a faster network (5G, 8G, 10G?) and even cheaper storage (cloud that is free to maintain and does not hit your operating expense every year?). Until that happens, we probably will trial more and scale less.
We all share the excitement for the possibilities that new technologies like facial recognition and VR bring to us today. Some of us even venture to realize and share those possibilities with our customers. Customers have the power to add and co-design their experiences, which is really exciting, too. JetBlue used facial recognition boarding to lead the industry. That innovation was embraced by customers and that is why everyone won at the end!
When Not To Invest In Self-Service Technology?
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Brand and Customer Experience – Make the Customer Know Who You Are
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CX Skills Builders: You May Have a CX Job and Not Know It
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#CXTHUS Exchange Insights – winners and losers?
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What is Customer Experience Strategy?
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The ROI of Customer Experience Programs
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Even the US Government is Jumping on the Customer Experience Train
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3 Challenges of Hybrid Working and How to Overcome Them
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The in-person work office design that will bring your employees back
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United Airlines Culture Problem
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How to Prepare for AI: Dispatches from CR Summit, Charleston
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Customer Experience Tips and Best Practices In 2017?
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Create Your Tribe: How Great CX Makes a Lifestyle Brand
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Why Customer Retention is the True Measure of SaaS Success
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How ChatGPT Can Help with the Healthcare Quadruple Aim
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Are You Ready to Go Exclusive with Jane, Your Digital Concierge?
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Why You Need Culture Not Call Center Training for Customer-Centric CX
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How a Personal Interaction builds Repeat Customers
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Customer Loyalty Begins In-House
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Do You Know Where Your Inventory Is?
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Why Bt2B Businesses Must Think Like B2C in the Next Decade
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Hospitality Experience and Why We lack Seamless Travel Experiences
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How Facial Recognition Works for Your Customers?
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Grateful for Customer Experience Heroes
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Digital Customer Experience Strategy – Top Three Mistakes
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How Do You Know You Are Making The Right Big Bet?
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Healthcare Whitepaper: Impact of Patient ‘I Wants’ in Healthcare
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Think Strategically about Telehealth in 2021
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From Pain Points to Magical Moments: Transform the Customer Experience
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5 Ways to Leverage OpenAI for Customer Experience
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5 Tips to Create Great Customer Experience Design Strategy
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What is the Real Cost of Employee Experience?
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A Customer Experience Strategy will Define Your Success in 2021
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The Wholehearted Traveler and Other 2024 Travel Trends
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What is Revenge Travel and Why People Do It
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Are You Thinking Strategically?
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Customer Facing Experience: Communication and Hospitality
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Can One Email Build Loyalty? #MYWESTELM
This is exemplary management of the post-purchase journey touch-point. For years, this level of management has been non-existent. At best, it tends to come in the form of an email confirmation that purchased items have been delivered.
Healthcare Experience Horror Story
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How to talk to your CFO about customer experience and revenue growth
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Customer Experience Plan is More Important than Ever
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How to approach Return-to-Office Resistance
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Patient Experience Trends in 2021 – Telehealth is Here to Stay
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Culture Starts at the Top
Without a leader who believes that today’s business success is about acquiring and retaining customers, you cannot even begin the process of building a culture. Leaders who are passionate about the customer are also passionate about creating culture and employee engagement.
Is Covid19 What We Needed to Build Seamless End-to-End Travel Experience?
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What is Journey Mapping?
Although we have published more than 130 articles on customer experience, we still have not dedicated an article to journey mapping. Journey mapping is the most widely recognized customer experience…
Get Customer Experience Basics Right and You Don’t Need to Invest in Wow Moments
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Diversity is more than difference of color
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What Flight Delays Teach about Customer Recovery
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Customer Experience, Self Service, and the Gift of Time
Time is the most precious gift in life. If you think about it, time is the one thing we all want more of. As we get older and busier, time gets even more valuable to us.
Return to Office – how to get it right in 2022?
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How to make work at home work?
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The One CX Goal You Need to Set for 2019
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JetBlue Leading Customer Experience
Since I used to lead the JetBlue customer experience, people often ask what is behind the JetBlue experience magic. Or, as one of our clients refers to it, the “JetBlue…
How Well Do You Understand AI Applications?
In the last week I spoke about AI at the Argyle Forum webinar and at the ConnectID Conference in Washington, DC. Technology is emerging
Holiday Wishes for Great CX: Career Advice Edition
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Customer Experience Audit: New York Times Beats Google
Editor’s Note: This post is part of a series of Customer Experience Audits. In this series we walk you through customer experience examples across industries. We feature brands that made…
The Great Re-onboading: How to Bring Back Your Employees
Re-onboarding is the next employee experience organizations need to tackle. Since March 2020, leaders have encountered pandemic shutdowns, remote workforce transitions, and the Great Resignation. As restrictions lift and we…
United CEO does not care about #customers happiness. Really?
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How to Overcome Hospitality Industry Challenges by Empowering Employees
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Freelance Customer Experience Lessons for Freelancers
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Coronavirus Travel: What Does Hospitality Mean Now?
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Human Experience: Do You Really Know Your Customers?
Steve Jobs said: “Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need before they realize it themselves.” He did not just say that….
Customer Experience Technology View of your Call Center
By 2022 the global cloud based contact center market is growing from USD 6.8Bn in 2017 to 20.93Bn in 2022. This makes for CAGR of 25.2%. If you do not…
Bad Travel Experience
As we come to the end of the summer season, it is time to talk about travel – good and bad travel experience. And how the sharing economy has both…
3 Ways to Create a Better Employee Experience Strategy
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Extend the Customer Journey with AI
Superior customer experience hinges on seamless customer journeys. We build strategies around this, design CX programs, and map the journeys of customer personas, all with the aim to meet customer…
How to Build Your Customer Experience Roadmap?
This summer, The Petrova Experience conducted a Customer Experience Preparedness Survey. One of our questions assessed brand maturity in terms of customer experience strategy. Only 28% of the respondents had…
Hiring Tips: Who Should I Hire First on My CX Team
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Customer Experience Best Practices for 2018?
The JetBlue blog features Liliana Petrova in a new four-part series. The series is on Customer Experience and Customer Experience Innovation. 2017 Lessons Liliana gathers insight from 2017 customer experience…
What is Telemedicine? Keeping Medicine at the Heart
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Customer Experience Audit: eBay’s Vibrant Marketplace of the Future
Editor’s Note: This post is part of a series of Customer Experience Audits. They highlight advances in artificial intelligence in retail and other technologies. See all audit stories. Two years…
Extend Your Travel Experience Value Proposition
Last December the Ladders published a piece that discusses business travelers who extend travel beyond the timeline of the business trip. The article says, “[a]ccording to a new study by La…
Paperless Customer Journey – JetBlue Deviceless Boarding
JetBlue Biometrics – Innovation and Disruption This year, JetBlue entered the ranks of the innovators who disrupt industries by applying customer experience technology. They not only imagine the future. They…
Contactless and Self-Service are Here to Stay
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CX Skills Builder: How to articulate your CX Value and secure your budget
Two weeks ago we urged you to find CX problems and fix them instead of diagnosing and mapping them. That is
Customer Experience Trends – 8 Actionable Tactics in 2021
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Is AI Really The Answer?
Earlier this week we shared some of the pitfalls of implementing self-service and highlighted the importance of strategic and empathetic implementation. AI (artificial intelligence) is one of the self-service tools…
What is Big Data and Why Should I Care?
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