In part two of our blog series on JetBlue’s approach to customer service, we dive into the financial and labor dynamics that shape the airline’s contact center operations. Shelly Griessel, VP of Customer Support at JetBlue, offers a candid look at the factors driving up costs, from first-contact resolution challenges to the role of AI in improving efficiency. But it’s not just about numbers—JetBlue is deeply committed to supporting their workforce, investing in training, and fostering a culture where employees feel valued and empowered. In this post, we’ll explore how GenerativeAgent, what JetBlue calls Amelia 2.0, is not just a tool for improving customer interactions, but a vital partner in alleviating burnout and keeping agents engaged. 

Watch the full discussion.

* Minor edits have been made to the transcript for clarity and readability.

Understanding Cost Drivers in Customer Service

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Dan: On cost reduction in the contact center, some will say, “okay, we're trying to reduce or maintain costs.” When you think of the financial aspect that either you or your peers are seeing, what is driving up that cost? Any insight that you have on what's affecting that?

Shelly: What's driving up the cost is that if you don't keep FCR at the highest possible level, customers will keep on calling back. And more volume means the cost of calls goes up.

So you have to try and find a way of doing two things in the customer contact center environment going forward. For us, it is bringing down the cost per call, and a big part of that is containment through conventional chat or now with more progressive, what we call Amelia 2.0 (powered by ASAPP’s GenerativeAgent). 

We call our bot Amelia (after Amelia Earhart) because we had to give her a name.

We really like her. She shows up every day. She's got no absenteeism problems, never wants PTO, and she just shows up every day, and she's always friendly. She's, like, always friendly.

The Role of AI in Enhancing Customer Interactions

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Shelly: So now we've got Amelia 2.0, which is gen AI, and she's a little bit more conversational, sometimes too much, but we're getting her there.

And I think that that is the next evolution.

We have to free crew members (JetBlue’s contact center agents) from having to deal with very basic stuff, and frankly, they get bored with it.

Our tenure is extremely long at JetBlue. The average tenure is about ten and a half years; they don't leave. But also the majority of our crew members are part-time.

So they work anything between fifteen and thirty hours a week. So that also helps with the lack of burnout. They don't burn out, and that's why.

But gen AI has got a massive role to play in this. It has a massive role to play in it.

Dan: When you're approaching the big topic of AI – something that’s so ubiquitous now that it's become very generic and losing a lot of its meaning and power – how are you and the team approaching those waters in the contact center space? What are the concerns and the outcomes that you're trying to get? 

Shelly: So when we started really ramping up AI, there was obviously a massive fear by our crew members about “it's gonna take my job away.” And that was a very real fear for them.

And then they started realizing that she (Amelia 2.0) actually covers the shifts that they don't want to do. So Amelia became very handy. She would work weekends, and she would work through the night. So from that perspective, it became less of a threat for them because they knew that she was complementing them.

And our containment is extremely high. We started two years ago in the low 30s – 35, 36% containment. And now we're sitting at between 68% and 70% containment.

It just never gets past Amelia. Amelia keeps it. But when a call actually eventually comes over to the crew member, all the hard work has kind of been done already, and they can step in and just start making decisions that the customer is looking to be made. So for us, we've embraced AI as a company. Crew members are still more afraid of “will a BPO take over my job?” They're all more afraid of that than they are of AI now.

Addressing Labor Concerns in the Age of AI

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Dan: When we talk about how agents are gonna lose jobs because of AI, I'm wondering why we aren't talking more about how agents are removing themselves from the job themselves and in record numbers. I think we are at 52-62% average turnover, major absenteeism, and the majority of contact center leaders are saying they are having a hard time recruiting.

I'm really interested in your thoughts on AI when it comes to this big issue of labor in the contact center and the high cost and absenteeism, and how contact centers are just dealing with that.

Shelly: We are proud of the fact that we don't lose people. But I think it's got a lot to do with the part-time model that we run. In fairness, there's a massive burnout level.

If you take call after call after call - and customers, let's be honest, they don't call in to say, ”way to go,” “I had a great flight,” “my flight was on time.” That's a given.

They don't. I mean, so every single call, call after call after call.

So we obviously manage it through the fact that they don't have these 40-hour week shifts, and they work part-time, so it makes for life to be a whole lot easier. But we also have a responsibility – and we spend a lot of time on culture. So we double down on culture. We watch our ratios of crew members to supervisors.

Maintaining Relevance in a Changing Workforce

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Shelly: I was sharing with you earlier how much time we spend with crew members – what we call the PDRs, which is protecting the direct relationship that we have with them. It's a big deal for us. And we explain to them the why behind BPOs, the why behind Amelia. And the more they understand it, the better. 

But the other obligation that we have in this industry is to make crew members or agents, wherever they are, relevant in five years from now because they won't be relevant if we don't make the effort. It's kind of our responsibility to do it.

And we have to teach them different scenarios of how to deal with de-escalation or really complicated problems. We have to, and that is where technology comes into it. Technology becomes their friend.

So I think we have a massive obligation and a responsibility to keep them relevant in the new world, and the communication has to be so big and so wide open to bring them along.

The worst thing that we can do is to make them feel disenchanted and they stay.  Because if they stay, your customers will feel the impact of their unhappiness. 

You've got an obligation. Employee engagement scores are huge in JetBlue. It's very, very big.

So we spend a lot of time on that, but I think that embracing technology as a part of it, we've never shied away from the fact that Amelia is there and this is what she does. These were her stats. We give them her stats on a daily basis because she's part of the team.

It's weird. She's not really a person, you know that.

Dan: Amelia is ASAPP's GenerativeAgent, but when she talks about it as Amelia, I'm like, yeah, she's part of the team. This nice woman in the front row said, “I wanna be Amelia's friend now.” 

Fostering a Valued Workforce Culture

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Dan: So, to put a finer point on it, because we are gonna talk about the tech part of this and the partnership with ASAPP later. Can you touch on what you are doing in the culture that you think, “this is going to have a really appreciable effect on keeping the crew members in the job?”

Shelly: People really want to feel they’re valued in the world. The feedback we constantly get from our crew members is that this is the first place I have worked at that I don't feel like a number. I'm not a number.

They've got access, and when we say they've got access to me as the VP, that is not just empty talk. It's real.

They really do have access. Every leader in my team has to dedicate two hours a week in their calendar for any crew member to talk to them about anything. Anything. And they blocked up those views.

We have monthly what we call "directly to you” meetings, in which it's open kimono. We tell them all the good and all the bad. The company is not doing well. The company is doing well. This is where we're going. Thhis is the good and the bad. 

We've got a CEO that absolutely believes in 100% transparency. There's absolutely no point in sugarcoating anything. You have to be very honest with people.

And that's how we bring 24,000 people along with us. That is the total number of crew members that we've got in the company, but that's how we bring them along and how we protect the culture. So for the customer contact center area, we are not unionized, and there's no talk of being unionized because people know that things get done faster when they come to Shelley directly or their director or their manager to say, “I'm really not happy about this.” “What are we gonna do about it?” “Oh, well, this is why I can't do anything about it.” 

So we absolutely believe in a very transparent relationship with them. We tell them the good and the bad all the time.

Read Part 1, JetBlue’s CX journey: tackling challenges in an evolving industry.

Part 3 coming soon.