Brief:

• Airline JetBlue added a chat feature to its app that lets travelers contact customer service directly. The chat keeps a record of prior online interactions between customers and airline employees, helping to avoid the inconvenience of having to repeat and recap prior conversations, per an announcement shared with Mobile Marketer.
• The in-app service adds to JetBlue's other supported communication channels such as voice calls, email, text and social messaging. The in-app chat provides airline employees with the same experience for those other channels, without any new software to learn.
• JetBlue partnered with customer-service technology firm Gladly on the chat service.

Insight:

By adding a chat feature to its mobile app, JetBlue aims to improve service for customers who have become more reliant on their smartphones as they travel. The airline is working with Gladly, which claims it elevates convenience for travelers by maintaining a record of their prior conversations with customer service representatives, while helping JetBlue handle a higher volume of requests more efficiently.

While chatbot technology aims to help resolve customer service requests automatically, many consumers still seek help from a live representative. Among 1,000 survey respondents who were asked what would prevent them from interacting with chatbots, only 14% said they prefer to fill out an online form, according to a Drift and SurveyMonkey report from earlier this year. Though it's a sign that consumers are not as interested in forms, 79% of companies an annual ranking of the top 100 cloud companies continue to use online forms due to a lack of technology integration, which could lead to inefficiencies in internal processes and frustrate consumers looking for quick responses.

U.S. organizations spend an estimated $112 billion on contact center labor and technology a year, but half of 270 billion incoming customer service calls still go unresolved, netting $41 billion in losses. That's a major incentive for companies like JetBlue to invest more heavily in chat-based technology, which can help to reduce customer service costs by 30%, according to one report.