Customer support is not just about answering customer questions—it's also about resolving customer issues quickly, and adapting to rapidly changing expectations. JetBlue has been on the forefront of this shift, with a model that’s built on 25 years of remote work and a deep commitment to empowering their agents. In this post, part one of a three-part blog series based on a discussion between Dan Rood, SVP Marketing at ASAPP, and Shelley Griessel, VP of Customer Support at JetBlue, we explore how the airline’s approach has adapted to the challenges of a rapidly evolving industry, where the unpredictable nature of customer needs and agents’ lives can make every day a unique experience. 

Watch the full discussion.

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

The unpredictable joys of contact center work

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Dan: I'd love to hear from you - what is a moment or moments that occur to you in this industry in your role that you go, “I love this job. I love this.” 

Shelly: I think without a doubt, it is the unpredictability.

We all think we've got our week planned out, we've got our day planned out, but it really doesn't work like that. I think that I love, love, love the fact that I've got absolutely no idea what's going to come at me today… And the unpredictability of what's happening in your crew members' lives (that's what we call our agents).

And it makes for just constant entertaining. Sometimes it's heart-wrenching stuff that you have to deal with. So we go permanently from a state of being absolutely ecstatic about life and, like, “we're winning every day” – and then they are just heartbreaking times.

And I think that's what I love most about the job.

I don't think… this is not what I planned to do in life, but just being in contact centers for so long, I think I've been blessed to have experienced so much over the thirty-five years that I've been in the business.

Why contact center challenges persist

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Dan: If we were to go back five years or ten years, the conversation in any surveys that we have in a room like this, is that three or four things happen in a contact center –  controlling, or even reducing costs, and improving CSAT, are the themes over and over again. And yet, in 2024, there's a lot of evidence to say it's not necessarily getting better. If you were to just step back, why does it feel like it is not getting better? 

Shelly: I think to start off with, the last four to five years have made it exponentially harder. There's something that has just clicked in the mind of consumers that they're not tolerating as much.

It feels like it is a lot harder to please. And I think that people are also more than ever before stretched for time. There's just so little tolerance for long hold times, and then they get through to somebody who is not going to wrap it up quick enough.

I think the most precious commodity in today's world is absolutely time.

I am of the belief that they want to get an answer quickly. They want to get a consistent answer. If they don't like it, then they'll phone back three or four or five or six or seven times, until they get the answer that they're looking for. That drives up costs, that drives down FCR.

It's just a lot more complicated, and I think COVID has a lot to do with it. It has also got a lot to do with how much more challenging crew members' lives are. It is harder, and the value of the job hasn't gone up. So people are not necessarily getting paid more, and they're holding down two or three jobs, which makes their lives complicated.

Remote work and customer expectations

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Shelly: In the JetBlue model, our contact center crew members work one hundred percent from home, and have since the beginning for 25 years.

In addition to that, as they work from home, they were challenged with, during COVID, being alone and having no contact with anybody else. So it's been a lot worse for them.

But I do think that for customers, it is a lot more about getting through to somebody that can give me an answer really quickly, and let me be on my way. And I want to do it when I want to do it, any time of the day or night. It's just a different experience that we have to offer customers today versus what it was.

Empowering contact center roles for speed and resolution

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Dan: At ASAPP, we call it abbreviating customer pain. From a performance standpoint, the main threshold that you're trying to get to is speed and obviously real resolution. Is that the strategy when it comes to keeping brand differentiation with JetBlue versus your competitors? 

Shelly: Absolutely. So we do want to speed it up, and we want to make sure that we use the human intellect in a different way than what we probably did three or five years ago. Which means that we are personally investing a lot more in the training and development of people to deal with the really tough issues. It doesn't help to say to a person, “You're empowered, and you can do what you need to do.” You actually have to teach them what empowerment looks like. So there's a lot more time and resources that we're spending on evolving the role of a customer support person.

And I do believe that the footprint of humans in a contact center is going to get smaller, but I think it's gonna finally become a higher paid role, because they're going to deal with a lot more complicated matters – a lot more complicated – and we should pay them more.

So I think the footprint will get smaller, but we should be able to pay them more.

Part 2 coming soon

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