As American Airlines looks to redefine its customer experience, technology — and the role of the CIO — is critical.
Chief Digital and Information Officer Ganesh Jayaram highlighted the three areas his team focuses on: delivering resilient products, driving technical engineering excellence and modernizing its technology stack and capabilities.
All of those goals contribute to an improved customer experience, Jayaram said, speaking last week with American’s chief communications officer, Ron DeFeo, on the airline’s podcast, “Tell Me Why.”
“The core tenant of that modernization is to ensure these modern technologies are much more resilient, and they allow us to drive real-time updates for our customers and also allow us to do real-time analysis so we serve the needs of our customers a whole lot better than what our legacy tools and technology would do,” Jayaram said. “We are trying to improve the journey for our customer end to end.”
Jayaram highlighted the airline’s revamped mobile app, which was designed with a more modern, intuitive feel and to make it easier for customers to use self service. IOS users can also turn on the live activities feature to get real-time updates on their flight.
“What that means is a couple of hours prior to your departure you get an update on where your flight is going to depart from at what time, and as you get closer to departure it tells you when you’re ready to board, it tells you the seat you're assigned to, and through the journey it tells you when you're going to land and a whole lot more,” Jayaram said. “So that is a better way to interact with our customers.”
New kiosk hardware at hub airports reduces the time that it takes customers to check in and check bags, too, Jayaram said.
“End to end, our focus is really to improve the interactivity, enable self service for our customers and really take out friction at as many points of the customer journey as we can,” Jayaram said.
Among the use cases the airline is using AI is in its chat feature.
“For our customer, if you have a weather event that really affects your travel, today we have chat functionality in the app that allows you to chat with us,” Jayaram said. “We're now embedding the generative AI capabilities into that chat functionality, so that customers can self service and do their rebooking on their own in a way that better suits their travel needs.”
The airline is also using the technology to avoid missed connections. By embedding the technology into the work flow the airline already has, the airline can better predict when a customer will miss their flight and can decide whether to delay some flights to accommodate customers.
