It’s 9:30 am at Newark gate C75, and United Airlines flight 131 is buttoning up for the long flight to Tokyo’s Haneda Airport. An AvGeek, your author, is hanging out with the crew in the flight deck as the captain conducts a preflight walkaround. Unbeknownst to everyone on board the aircraft, one of United’s Storytellers is preparing to deliver some bad news to both crew and passengers.
Before 2018, United was like every other airline in only sharing basic “delayed” and “canceled” statuses, leaving it up to individual crews and gate agents to decipher and relay more detailed information to passengers. That changed for United when it first deployed what’s known internally as “every flight has a story”.
United’s initiative goes above and beyond the basic flight status descriptors that are as old as the industry itself, instead providing a custom description that can include specifics such as the actual mechanical issue causing the delay, or an explanation that the flight is being briefly held because connecting passengers from another flight are on their way.
“The insight we had was that if people feel like they’re getting complete and good information, they have a higher trust in what they’re hearing, which makes the journey better,” explained United’s Chief Information Officer Jason Birnbaum. “Things happen, but if the customers feel like they’re getting accurate, timely information…it just makes the whole experience better. And we see that in our NPS scores.”
Overheard an announcement thag this flight was re-boarding and I wanted to see what happened. Man do I love these detailed delay descriptions @united writes. #PaxEx pic.twitter.com/R4v22TMJu5
— Jason Rabinowitz (@AirlineFlyer) October 31, 2021
Airlines are complex organizations, and distilling information from across the global network is key. Birnbaum explains that all flights have someone keeping an eye on what’s happening at the operations center in Chicago, communicating with crews and maintenance staff on the ground at airports.
That person kicks off the communication internally with key words or data about potential issues. “So, normal situation, mechanical, I would put in a ‘there’s a mechanical’, the person would re-quote a new time, say we’re going to be 30 minutes delayed. And then a message would go out as a result of that. And that’s all happened automatically, with the tools that our operations folks have.” The majority of flights with problems see a canned message.
For about 15% of all flights with a message going out — generally flights looking at delays of an hour or more or with a “really unique situation” — Birnbaum explains this is when a Storyteller comes into play. “And their job is to craft that message… So they will then look at all the data that’s going on, get all the information and then write a custom message for our employees and for our customers, because employees get it too for our customers to let them know what’s going on. And then at that point there, those Storytellers become the quarterback, if you will, of the customer communication.”
While it’s not unusual for an airline’s corporate communications teams to distill and provide operational information, that typically only occurs for noteworthy flights or when a member of the media specifically asks for information. United’s Storytellers, however, are individuals specifically hired and deployed for their customer communication skills and their ability to distill complex airline jargon into clear and empathetic messages. This is their primary role at the airline.
While United finds that honesty and detail is crucial to keeping delayed passengers abreast, it’s a psychological tightrope walk between providing useful information and providing too much information that may unnerve wary passengers. “There’s probably not much we wouldn’t share,” confided Birnbaum.
“I think we’ll be trying to be as candid as we can about the situation… Like we would never say ‘we’re not going to talk about this particular issue or that particular issue’, we would say ‘how do we talk about this issue in a way that conveys what we need to convey but doesn’t create more confusion or concern, or, or challenges for the operation?’ Because people…misinterpret what’s trying to be said. So I don’t think we have any sort of taboo areas in terms of what we wouldn’t talk about.”
Airlines typically play a game of follow the leader, and Birnbaum is surprised that other airlines haven’t duplicated its Storyteller model. “I think there’s lots of things we’ve done that I am surprised that other airlines haven’t adopted as well.”
Birnbaum does see this as an industry-wide problem, however, acknowledging there are costs associated with this effort but he sees it as an investment. While the Storyteller messages can apply to United Express flights, the information stops flowing if a passenger connects onward to any United partner, such as Lufthansa.
United is looking to increase the number of flights receiving custom messages through the use of generative artificial intelligence, which is in beta testing at the time of writing. Birnbaum envisions a bump from 15% up to 50% of flights in the near future, explaining that Storytellers would still give final approval to any message and make tweaks as necessary. “[W]hat I think you’ll start seeing is more about more and better messaging in more and more situations as we move to using some of these tools to do the heavy lifting.”
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