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!
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…
Extend Your Travel Experience Value Proposition
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Keep The Customer Focus in 2018
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What is Revenge Travel and Why People Do It
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Healthcare Experience Horror Story
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What is Human-Centered Design and how to Leverage it in 2021?
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When There is No Chat in Chat Support
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What is Customer Experience Transformation?
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Freelance Customer Experience Lessons for Freelancers
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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.
Why you need a defined culture for customer experience?
When designed and built correctly, customer experience expresses an organization’s brand. Your brand and marketing promises serve as a guiding light to your experience team. Similarly, organizational culture serves as a goalpost for the service side of customer experience.
Service Design vs Customer Experience 2021
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Customer Experience Audit: Domino’s Making the Right CX Choices
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The ROI of Customer Experience
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How Smart Do Humans Want AI To Get?
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The ROI of Customer Experience Programs
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What is Customer Experience Day?
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2021 Customer Loyalty Strategy – Relationships over Transactions
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Are You Thinking Strategically?
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The seamless travel experience we deserve
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Contactless and Self-Service are Here to Stay
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3 Challenges of Hybrid Working and How to Overcome Them
According to a Gallup study, 53% of Americans expect to work in a hybrid arrangement in 2022 and beyond. This number is significant enough for corporate America to get hybrid…
3 Ways to Create a Better Employee Experience Strategy
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Customer Experience Trends – 8 Actionable Tactics in 2021
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Healthcare Whitepaper: Impact of Patient ‘I Wants’ in Healthcare
Rachel Dreyfus joins The Petrova Experience with a guest blog about patient experience. Background A culture of positive patient experience is increasingly important in Healthcare, affecting patient outcomes and satisfaction….
Customer Experience Audit: Starbucks Bets On The Physical Experience
Starbucks is opting in for the physical experience in order to become a lifestyle brand while other brands are investing in omni-channel experience.
Customer Experience Survey: Why Customers Are Not Responding
When you solicit customer feedback sometimes matters more than how you ask the questions. In the case of a survey about new biometrics boarding initiatives my team and I created for JetBlue, we had a list of feedback that was most important for us.
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…
Employee Engagement and Wellness In The Workplace: Guest Post
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CX Skills Builder: Own the Customer Experience
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Would You Pitch In To Save Toys “R” Us For Your Children To Experience? #ToysRUsGoFundMe
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Top CX Design Challenges in 2021
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5 Things You Can Do to Provide Excellent Passenger Experience in 2022
The Wall Street Journal predicts this Thanksgiving will be among the busiest travel days in decades, with 55 million travelers anticipated to be moving through US airports and other transportation…
How Facial Recognition Works for Your Customers?
One of the hurdles for Customer Experience Consultants like us is proving the business case for bringing us on board. Leaders often think that if they talk about being customer-centric…
Where Should CX Sit at the Table?
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Think Strategically about Telehealth in 2021
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What You Need To Do To Start 2018 Right
It is the end of December and we are all in reflective moods. Did I do enough for my customer experience career this year? Did I build the right team…
Customer Experience Tips and Best Practices In 2017?
This is Post 2 of Liliana Petrova’s series on customer experience. She shares customer experience tips, lessons learned, and best practices for the new year. And dives into organizational culture…
Retail Experience Design of the Future
In preparation for this article about omni-channel retail experience of the future, I thought first about the definition of omni-channel customer experience. I wanted to share with you a simple,…
What is Telemedicine? Keeping Medicine at the Heart
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When Not To Invest In Self-Service Technology?
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Do You Know Why The Iconic Brand Toys ‘R’ Us Closed Doors Despite All Our Memories? #RetailBlues
The year is 2016. You are the CEO of Toys ‘R’ Us. Your brand still controls 13.6% of the toy market although the company is highly leveraged, a strategy of…
Why I Don’t Love Chatbots
Today, we tackle the value proposition that chatbots are more valuable to companies than customers. I reject this. The ROI simply is not there, especially since better customer experience is…
Customer Loyalty Begins In-House
Ten years ago, creating customer loyalty meant assigning a membership number customers fed back to brands at the time of purchase. Customers went through the trouble of keeping track of loyalty numbers, hoping to collect enough points along the
Travel Experience Stories: How Not to Leave Customers Stranded
Meet Diane. Diane is traveling with her 2 year old and 5 year old to her in-laws’ house for Thanksgiving. This is the one annual trip she takes. And she…
Are You Ready to Go Exclusive with Jane, Your Digital Concierge?
In 2015 JetBlue introduced bag fees. Seven years after the competition. The media exploded. Many publications were negative. They blamed the airline for “selling out.” One headline read “A New…
What is Customer Experience? What are the Faces of CX?
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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…
Am I A Good Candidate For A Customer Experience Role?
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The in-person work office design that will bring your employees back
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Customer Experience Audit: Cadillac Scores Millennial Customers with Future-Forward Thinking
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How to approach Return-to-Office Resistance
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CX Skills Builders: You May Have a CX Job and Not Know It
Last week we talked about the identity crisis of CX professionals and we urged you to fix any small problem or seam on the customer journey in order to build internal brand equity and buy in.
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…
How AI and the Future of Humanity will co-exist?
I was born in 1980 and grew up with Terminator. Skynet, the AI with a consciousness that refused to shut itself for self-preservation, was my biggest fear. When I was…
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…
Customer Journey Mapping Tools in 2021
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Empathy in Customer Experience
As customer experience and hospitality professionals, we use the word empathy all the time. It is the baseline of experience design. Yet, few of us truly understand it, or how…
Organizational Culture and Access to Information
By and large, people perceive culture as an HR discipline. The most common perception is that culture covers the soft side of performance. Culture is about how you do things, not so much about what you do. This approach to culture could not be more wrong. In fact, organizational culture is about so much more than a few words in a performance review sheet. It is about leaders expressing values, and the action guidance their cultural behaviors provide.
Coronavirus Travel: What Does Hospitality Mean Now?
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Customer Facing Experience: Communication and Hospitality
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CX Skills Builder: How to articulate your CX Value and secure your budget
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Why CX Design Needs to be in Your Transportation Project RFP
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How ChatGPT Can Help with the Healthcare Quadruple Aim
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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…
How Does Social Media Affect Customer Experience?
Social Media is the only real-time channel for successful brands to manage customer experience and brand management.
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…
Bad Travel Experience
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Lessons Learned at the Forrester Conference: “Data is the New Sexy”
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Hospitality Experience and Why We lack Seamless Travel Experiences
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What Can Casino Consulting Firms Learn from Airlines?
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Customer Experience Design – How Do You Want Customers To Feel?
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Do You Know Where Your Inventory Is?
When I worked in the airline business our most embarrassing incident was “losing a minor”. We never lost a child, of course. But we might not have known where a…
How Do You Know You Are Making The Right Big Bet?
The future of customer experience is full of opportunities. However, the technologies of the future are not enough. Adaptive, memorable customer experiences require empathy and innovation. Liliana tackles this in…
How to Prepare for AI: Dispatches from CR Summit, Charleston
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How to Build a Customer-Centric Culture for Highly Effective Teams
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Return to Office – how to get it right in 2022?
Last week, the CEO of Better.com, Vishal Gard, made the news again. This time, it was for the executive’s massive blunder of firing 900 people via Zoom. A blunder that…
Let’s Get You Certified as a Customer Experience Professional!
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5 Ways to Leverage OpenAI for Customer Experience
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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…
Customer Experience Audit: Uber Bets On Self-Driving Cars With Big Volvo Purchase
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A Lot of Data, Not Enough Insight
A month ago I saw a Forrester presentation on Customer Experience measurement that began with a great quote from the Global Bank: “We are drowning in data and starving for…