Now the tide is changing as customer expectations shift. But it’s taken longer for them to get excited about providing those kinds of experiences for employees. “Now they can do all that without leaving the plane.” Changing expectationsĪ lot of companies have been eager to provide great mobile experiences for customers. “In the old world, if a plane needed maintenance attention, the way it would work is the technician would have to go to the plane, figure out what’s going on, walk back to the base, get manuals, go back to the plane, figure out what parts they need, go back to the terminal, order parts, go back to the plane, and then fix the plane,” he said. They can step out from behind the podium.”Īirplane technicians are enjoying a similar kind of freedom with their devices, Birnbaum said. “In a world where every employee has a mobile device, more people can help and respond quickly to customers. People line up behind those two terminals,” he said. “If you think of a situation where customers need assistance at the airport, the biggest constraint is the number of terminals.
In airports, gate agents are changing seat assignments and checking bags with their devices, and using the freedom of portable computers to help customers wherever and whenever they need assistance. Onboard, flight attendants are using mobile devices to perform retail transactions and resolve customer care issues in-the-moment. The mobile employeeĪcross the organization, Birnbaum said, United employees are able to do their jobs more efficiently than they were just a year ago. United Airlines is building enterprise apps with the help of IBM to transform how United employees engage with customers. It’s allowed them to feel confident in engaging our customers in a lot of different situations, and ultimately our customers get their service more quickly and more effectively,” Birnbaum said. “It’s had a really positive impact on our employees in terms of their understanding of our commitment to them. Users, as a result, felt true ownership of the final product. Their input helped inform the design of each application. Additionally, the United team focused on engaging its front-line employees throughout the entire development and deployment journey. As the cost of the applications went down and success had been proven, it was easier and easier to justify,” he said.
“As we built more code in the code library, each piece of functionality was less expensive to create. Key to that acceleration, he said, was the development of a DevOps platform and the creation of a reusable library of code. “We really looked at that partnership to make the apps more consistent, to accelerate them and enable a lot of sharing,” Birnbaum said. Last year, that promise got closer to reality when United announced it would partner with Apple and IBM to transform their application development and would use IBM’s Mobile at Scale for iOS model to quickly and efficiently design, develop, deploy and maintain a suite of new iOS apps for its employees. “My job was to help create a vision, align the team, and fulfill that promise that we all knew existed, which was that if we leveraged technology we could really create a competitive advantage for United,” he told IBM. The transformation, in other words, had yet to prove truly transformative. That’s because each app was essentially a bespoke creation with its own distinct design and user experience. But United’s process of building applications for those devices wasn’t moving fast enough, Birnbaum told IBM. The devices-more than 50,000 of them by 2017-were arriving in the workforce quickly. In 2015, it began to rollout iPhones for their 23,000 flight attendants. In 2011, the airline announced that 11,000 of its pilots would get iPads to replace paper flight manuals. For years, United had been increasing the number of mobile devices available to its front-line employees. When Jason Birnbaum joined United Airlines as VP of operations technology in 2015, the airline was in the middle of a transformation.
This story is part of Big Thinkers, a series of profiles on business leaders transforming industries with bold ideas.