In many cases, tweeting at an airline can really result in shorter wait times than sternly repeating “representative” on the phone or running a gantlet of scripted if-then scenarios with an online textbox. A study last year by the customer-experience company Emplifi found that among 23 industries, airlines had the second-fastest average customer-response time. ![]() In some ways, airlines demonstrated the viability of extending customer service over social media-if they could do it, any brand could. Over the past decade, Facebook and Twitter emerged as efficient alternatives, allowing airlines to automate their response to certain posts and messages while paying special attention to the most urgent issues (or in some cases, the highest-profile users). Mindsay, a company that develops conversational AI for the industry, estimates that each support call costs airlines $2.20 in 2017, Harvard Business Review pegged the average cost of a live customer-service interaction at three times that amount. But call centers are expensive-even in Manila. Customers rarely know all of the data that apply to their itinerary, which meant that until the advent of more advanced AI in recent years, changing a flight or locating a bag required a human intermediary, someone fluent in airline and English who could translate a question and input it as DL754, ATL, 19B, and Y. ![]() That old tech speaks in short codes: confirmation numbers, airport initials, seat numbers, passenger types. It’s a fax for text messages.) “So we are dealing with very, very old tech,” he added. (He paused to make sure I knew what a telex was. “The basic systems which said ‘Box A talks to Box B via telex’ have largely remained unchanged since the 1950s,” Timothy O’Neil-Dunne, an airline-industry consultant, told me. By 1964, the system could process some 7,000 bookings an hour, at a time when ticketing agents working manually could process one or two. Customers would call a travel agent, who would then call an airline ticketing agent, who would then input the trip particulars. In 1960, IBM and American Airlines launched the first computerized reservation tool, based on a program developed for the Air Force. These daunting customer-service demands have pushed airlines to automate since the dawn of mainframes. Multiply passenger expectations by the total number of seats-Delta flies something like the population of Sacramento every day, on average-and you start to appreciate the sector’s complexities. And customers feel they deserve a certain level of care: After all, despite its gradual democratization, air travel remains quite expensive, especially in this period of high inflation. Flights are delayed, bags get lost, people have to change their plans. If you’re traveling this summer, you better hope that you don’t need help from an airline.Īirlines belong to a category of consumer-facing businesses that marketers call “high-touch” they deal with customers whose needs are constantly evolving. Airline customer service is caught between two eras of the internet: one built on social media, the other on machine learning. “A chatbot being able to talk and to learn and to suggest and to persuade and do all of these things that humans do? I haven’t seen it in action, personally,” Eva Ascarza, a co-founder of the Customer Intelligence Lab at Harvard Business School, told me. But hype-fueled AI products have yet to pick up the slack. First they didn’t want to do it in person, then they didn’t want to do it by phone, now they don’t want to do it online, and soon they won’t want to do it at all. The long-standing truth is that companies don’t want to talk to you. At the same time, airlines are leaning into AI, betting that the latest wave of chatbots will be the most cost-effective way to support customers. Air France, KLM, and Ryanair have all suspended customer service on Twitter, which for a time may have been the quickest way to summon a living, breathing employee.Īs Twitter melts down and people flee Facebook, social media just isn’t as useful as it once was for airline customer service. Alaska Airlines is removing check-in kiosks at certain airports, driving people to its app. Frontier will no longer take your call, encouraging fliers to make contact via chatbot. In recent months, airlines around the world have changed how they engage with customers who need help. ![]() Those were dark days in airline customer service, with so many travelers desperate to figure out alternative plans. We sent a Twitter message to the brand on March 17 and received a response seven weeks later that read, in full, “Twitter Feedback.” ![]() We pleaded with its online chatbot, a lobotomized character named AVA. We called the airline’s customer-support line: no dice. At the start of lockdown, we scrambled to secure a refund. In early 2020, when the coronavirus was still a distant concern, my wife and I booked an AirAsia flight to Bali.
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