Previous posts: here (Part I), here (Part II), here (Part IIb), here (Part III), here (Part IV), here (Part V).

Wherein Our Hero Eats Turkey & JetBlue Makes Boo-koo Bucks Off of Him

It’s been a while since my last post, admittedly, but with good reason. As I said in a previous post, I acquired a nice little nest of 35 points for buying the All-You-Can-Jet and got quite close to a free roundtrip.

Thanksgiving has put me over the threshold, which, this year, in terms of JetBlue eating my money, was significant.

You see, my dear CRM-heads (to retool a phrase we use over at Speech Tech), I was an awful procrastinator buying tickets to fly home to Florida this year. For a while I wasn’t sure, because of work, whether I would even make it. I ended up having to contend with the mercenary fares the airlines charge two weeks in advance of the carbon-emission-nightmare free-for-all that is holiday travel.

[More after the jump...]

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Bob Kraut, vice president of marketing communications, took the stage yesterday at Forrester’s Consumer Forum in Chicago with his iPhone in hand. After introducing Pizza Hut’s native iPhone application, he did what most attendees were hoping he would do. “I’m going to order a pizza to the conference,” Kraut said.

Kraut, whose background is in advertising and emerging media, spoke about Pizza Hut’s strategies in marketing to its customers — and its goals in connecting to customers in a fragile economy. There’s a new mindset out there that’s going to stick around, Kraut said. Not only are consumers more strategic in searching for deals and the best value for their dollar, customer confidence is low. A company such as Pizza Hut is especially linked to consumer confidence, he said. “Whatever we can do to lessen anxiety, give more choices, and give more value, Pizza Hut is prepared to do,” he told attendees.

Kraut then shared Pizza Hut’s 4 Key Strategies in marketing to its customers:

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Previous posts: here (Part I), here (Part II),  here (Part IIb), here (Part III), and here (Part IV)

Wherein Our Hero Fights for $100 at the Heart of the JetBlue Contact Center

I got an agent after a few minutes on hold — maybe five or six, but now that I was in full meltdown mode it seemed like a thousand, compared to the instantaneous service I had received before.

When an agent picked up, I hurriedly gave her all my information, asking her, desperately, if my flights were in order and if I would ever be able to leave Rochester (which more and more seemed like a prison of sprawling greens and rivers). The agent assured me that I did have a flight booked from Rochester back to Florida. She added, however, that I had missed a flight from Florida to Rochester a couple hours back and would now be levied with a $100 penalty fee.

Turns out, the agent who had booked me before had correctly added my new flights, but she forgot to cancel my old ones. Originally, I was supposed to go to Florida first and then Rochester, but due to a scheduling conflict had to switch the trips. Now, I found myself effectively double booked. I explained this to the agent and asked what could be done. Right away she canceled the remaining flight from Rochester to my next destination, Washington, D.C.. Still, however, the $100 fee remained. I pressed her on that and told her to go ahead and look at when I booked the flights. She could see for herself that I had called the second reservation in 20 minutes after the first. Clearly, my story checked out.

“Hold on,” she said. She had to check the terms. Read the rest of this entry »

Previous posts: here (Part I), here (Part II),  here (Part IIb), and here (Part III)

The Day of the Double Flights

So, first things first.

One has to ask: Why, given that JetBlue saves money by having people book online and given that the All-You-Can-Jet pass essentially encourages people to make long calls into its contact center to book tons of flights all at once, would it force all of the pass’s bearers to book through the phone? I suspect that it’s precisely because it’s a hassle — quick as the service in that contact center is. By forcing people to call in and actually talk to someone, JetBlue probably shaves some lazy people off the top who buy the pass online, but can’t be arsed to push 10 digits on a phone to do so. Likewise, it probably prevents some lazy people from booking extra flights because they can’t be bothered to call to make the arrangements and then forget by the time they would have had to make them.

To top it all off, as a mere publicity stunt, by making people book online, JetBlue derives all the advantages of free promotion, and makes people comb through its website and familiarize themselves with the service, while preventing them from casually taking advantage of the pass.

Sneaky, sneaky. Or so I presume.

The drawback to this system for JetBlue is that it exposes itself to all the pitfalls of its contact center. Turns out, when I booked my flights and then called back to switch around some of the flights, things went haywire.
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[Editors' Note: Earlier posts in this series can be found here (Part I), here (Part II), and here (Part IIb).]

Book ‘Em, Dano

Because JetBlue would only let me book over the phone, I had to go through several annoying steps to get my flights in order. After I had built up my complicated list of interlocking flights and figured out a rough outline of where I would be and when, I had to look on its Web site to make sure the airline actually had flights between all the destinations — in the order I wanted — and had seats available. This led to some frustrating reshuffling as my trips pushed the limits of the airlines network.

JetBlue is primarily based out of New York. It has many flights into and out of the city’s oldest and noticeably aged airport, La Guardia, but a great deal more go in and out of T5, its massive high-tech flagship terminal at JFK International Airport.

Actually, in general, the company has a lot of flights coming to and going from the East Coast. It doesn’t, however, have a whole lot going on over on the West Coast.

You can’t, for instance, get from San Francisco to Portland, or Portland to Seattle, or the other way ’round. To get from one place on the West Coast to another, you pretty much have to fly back to Long Beach — an hour (or three, depending on traffic) outside of Los Angeles — and change planes there.

Given the incredible deal I was capitalizing on, I wasn’t too aggrieved by the situation, but if I were just a regular West Coaster looking to get around the Pacific Coast region, I probably wouldn’t be looking to hard into cramming my plans through JetBlue’s maze of inter-West Coast connections. With All You Can Jet pass in hand, though, my middle names were “Westy Cram.”

I spent several hours figuring it all out and making sure there were seats available. Once I had all the flight numbers and times down, I called in to book them. Again, I had almost no wait time getting to an agent. The agent was super polite and helpful. Each flight (there were around 10 total) had to be input manually — and separately — and then for each one I also had to be confirmed, assigned a seat, and then booked.

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Interesting side note: according to JetBlue, a lot of what drove the coverage of  the All-You-Can-Jet pass — which was featured on all the major broadcast networks — was social media. The airline released a traditional press release, but also made an announcement to its 1 million-plus followers on Twitter.

“Within minutes [of the Tweet], we could see the response start to trickle in,” JetBlue spokesman Bryan Baldwin told USA Today. “We were just watching the hits come in on Twitter. They were coming in by the dozens. It really got its jumpstart in the social media world.”

The company also says that its Web-site’s traffic increased more than 800 percent after the announcement was made.

My own decision to buy the ticket wasn’t motivated by social media — I don’t use Twitter. I had heard about the promotion on National Public Radio, but it’s interesting to note the role that social media may play in coverage. If something manages to develop some buzz in a social space it (ostensibly) displays evidence of value in that social network — and that proves its value as an item of interest to news organizations.

In my own experience as a journalist, I can attest to a kind of desperate frenzy on the part of news organizations to get a bead on what’s important to an audience. If you can convince a news outlet that you’ve got something that people are interested in, you won’t have to do much arm-twisting to get that news outlet to pick it up. And any coverage that results only extends the reach of that buzz even further. If the story hadn’t made it into the major news circuit, for instance, it’s unlikely that JetBlue would be sitting on my $599.

Whether all that buzz has translated into sales for JetBlue is another story — as you’ll see in my later posts.

The Initial Call

I was expecting to be on hold forever. The JetBlue All-You-Can-Jet pass was all over the news and I was buying it on the first day of the offer. I didn’t even have to wait the slimmest second, though. They must have beefed up manpower for ticket. I was patched through to an agent immediately and was done with the whole purchase on the inside of ten minutes. JetBlue has won all kinds of praise for its Utah-based contact center. It lets its agents work from home, so they can work fairly comfortably and happily and consequently offer better service. I tell you, though; the agent must have been a hardened veteran by the time she got to my call. She had her All-You-Can-Jet spiel down to an art, gathering my info in graceful, ergonomic fashion and making me aware of the restrictions that came with the pass before processing my order with practiced, acrobatic ease.

I must say, throughout the entire process (despite a couple of screw ups on JetBlue’s part) I have been mightily impressed by the JetBlue agents. This first agent actually worked it me through the process so fast I had to say, “You’ve got this thing pat. Have you been selling a lot of passes?”

“All day,” she said. “You have no idea.”

When I bought the ticket, I didn’t book any flights. The trip, which was to be a series of here-to-there’s, from airport to airport could go out like a string of Christmas lights if one leg fell through. If, for instance, I couldn’t make it to Chicago for some reason, I wouldn’t be able to catch my flight to Los Angeles, which means I wouldn’t be able to make the next flight and so on and so on, and I’d get slapped with at least a small handful of the missed flight fees if I didn’t cancel on time. Rather than missing any and chancing the wrath of a jilted JetBlue, I decided sure up commitments from all the friends I intended to stay with before booking the corresponding flights.

In a lot of ways, what followed was one of the most fun parts of my adventure across America. The days when I was plotting out my route, there was an intense feeling of freedom and possibility. Really, I could pretty much go anywhere inside of the continental United States whenever I wanted to. Sitting there with JetBlue’s map, I entertained fantasies of seeing The Preservation Hall Jazz Band one night in New Orleans and waking up Houston to see the Hot Club of Cowtown the next. It didn’t end up working out that way. I had a thesis to write and, consequently, I decided to spend around five days in each place to get a firm toehold in the work between stops. When I really sat down to chart where I was going, I felt a little disappointment about all the places I wouldn’t be going. That happy little period dried up all too quickly.

As I was hammering out the details, I was becoming increasingly paranoid that the flights would book up before I’d solidified my plans and I wouldn’t be able to go squat anywhere. I really started to sweat it out when the pass precipitously sold out a day before the window JetBlue had set aside to sell them ran up.

“We wanted to ensure those who bought the pass could get the flights they want, so we capped the number of passes we would sell,” said JetBlue spokeswoman Jenny Dervin to Reuters.

As I would find out over the course of this trip, changing my plans left and right, however, I really didn’t have anything to worry about. Dervin and JetBlue had done their jobs—well, sort of.

Tomorrow: Booking the Flights!

Over the next several blog posts, I’m going to be recounting my experiences with JetBlue’s All-You-Can-Jet pass, a promotion that began about a month ago and was blasted in just about every U.S. news media outlet for nearly a week. I bought one of the airline’s promotional passes. What follows is an account of my relationship with it as it evolved over the course of the last month.

Please feel free to ask questions, leave comments as the Oddessy of the CRM heart and mind begins!

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By Denis Pombriant, founder and managing principal, Beagle Research Group

Market analysis firm IDC figures the market for service and support software will reach $4.2 billion before the end of the first Obama administration. That’s reason enough for software vendors to want to be all over the market like a cheap suit, like white on rice, like a junkyard dog. But as the market moves from on-premises to on-demand you can expect the revenue potential to go way down. That’s the beauty of on-demand computing — score one for the customer.

But whether there are four billion of those dollars or just one billion, that’s still real money — and enough to motivate the behavior of lots of people — so it was no surprise that both Salesforce.com and Oracle shored up their service and support offerings this week. What was fascinating to me is that, despite all the secrecy surrounding each company’s announcement, which I witnessed first hand, the two CRM titans managed to make similar announcements within a day of each other.

I attribute the coincidence to the simple logic of the situation: Each company has built out very good offerings in sales and marketing, so it was time that each gave some extra attention to service and support.

[More after the jump...]

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So, really now:

I know American Apparel founder Dov Charney’s in no position to get pissed (let alone struggle to locate the moral high ground) over an apparel company’s ad campaign — just ask Woody Allen — but I think he might actually be justified if he’s got his skimpy knickers in a twist over the style and format of Gap Inc.’s new “Born to Fit” campaign:

Now compare that to a typical American Apparel ad:

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Now, I know Helvetica is the world’s workhorse when it comes to typefaces, but am I really the only one who thinks this is over the line?

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