Breeze Airways Transforms Guest Care with Digital-First Strategy

The Challenge

Founded in 2021, Breeze Airways is a domestic airline redefining the aviation industry. This award-winning airline bypasses major airport hubs to provide shorter travel times and more affordable flights. But their innovative approach extends beyond air travel, paving the way for a new era in customer service.

Breeze Airways aims to provide guests with an experience that is “Seriously Nice.” This core value applies to everything, from booking to seating arrangements. However, turning customer service into a pleasant experience required a new approach.

Airline travelers are used to less-than-efficient interactions with customer care. Legacy technology has resulted in tedious wait times, difficulty adjusting travel plans, and poor transparency. These cumbersome and complex tools force agents to use multiple software tabs and phone calls to answer individual queries, creating a challenging experience for both parties. Introducing a generic AI exacerbates the challenges consumers and airlines face.

As a result, Breeze Airlines decided to take the road less traveled. They would be the first airline to adopt an entirely “digital-first” approach to customer service — renamed Guest Empowerment — and bypass traditional call center limitations.

All they needed was the right partner.

The Solution

For Breeze Airways’ leadership, the desire to change airline customer care stemmed from over 100 years of combined industry experience. They realized today’s most meaningful relationships rely on text-based communication, not lengthy phone calls. Instead of using call centers, Breeze could leverage an intelligent, multichannel system.

Enter Gladly.

From the outset, it was clear that Gladly was the perfect partner for Breeze Airways. Sharing the airline’s commitment to putting the customer first, this alignment ensured a seamless collaboration and a shared objective: empowering Breeze’s guests.

The Breeze team implemented Gladly, a people-centered, AI-powered Customer Service Platform that uses guest profiles over support tickets, to execute their vision and strategy for creating an AI-driven, digital-first “contact center.”

Rather than using a generic, “out-of-the-box” model, Breeze thoughtfully tweaked and trained Gladly’s conversational and collaborative AI to improve its processes and support its agents. When guests need to modify or cancel flights, Answer Threads, Gladly’s generative AI feature, enables Breeze to present their options rapidly in conversational chat or SMS while strictly adhering to approved content built from its tailored knowledge base. With built-in safeguards and quality control algorithms, Answer Threads ensures all interactions remain safe, accurate, and aligned with Breeze’s brand guidelines.

“The evolution of our product has allowed us to provide options to guests much more quickly than any other airline,” says Danny. “With digital communication and features like Answer Threads, we can empower our guests with quick and efficient solutions.”

Through Gladly’s intelligent routing, Breeze ensures guests with pressing travel needs reach the right agent at the right time — all based on flight times and departure dates. This approach, combined with Gladly’s single conversational timeline, which unifies a guest’s entire conversation history, no matter the channel, streamlines processes, including compliance.

But Breeze didn’t stop there. They also leveraged Gladly to transform crew communications. The platform enables crew members to reach crew services through their preferred channel when reporting schedule impacts, while documenting every interaction and allowing the team to simultaneously contact multiple reserves. Gladly documents everything, ensuring vital procedures are followed, saving time, and reducing costly canceled flights.

Outcome

Breeze’s digital-first, people-centered approach to customer service has yielded impressive results across the board. By leveraging Gladly’s conversational and collaborative AI to prioritize time-sensitive requests and resolve routine questions, Breeze achieved a 40% YoY customer growth without increasing guest interactions. This efficiency allowed for scaled operations and improved customer satisfaction, reflected in their industry-leading NPS of 58, on par with many top airlines.

Through intelligent prioritization and automation, Breeze has decreased handle times by 45%, with AI fully resolving 37% of conversations. This streamlined approach saves guests time and reduces operational costs, leading to a 69% adoption rate of self-service options.

As a result, only 6% of guests needed to be contacted during peak travel, down from 9% the previous year. Guests rapidly adopted digital channels, with voice communication reserved for rare, complicated cases. The team soon discovered that of more than 500,000 interactions, only 0.2% needed to be handled by phone.

Danny Cox, VP of Guest Experience, emphasizes: “We’re continually working with our technology team and Gladly to ensure that we answer questions quickly and empower guests with the information they need to resolve issues independently.”

Breeze’s approach strikes a balance between AI and human assistance, supporting rather than replacing its agents. This strategy has not only improved customer satisfaction but also reduced agent turnover.

With Gladly, Breeze Airways has achieved its goal of providing guests with a “Seriously Nice” experience, avoiding long wait times and inefficiencies typical of legacy customer care support. By empowering guests, agents, and crew members with strategic AI support, integrated communications, and transparency, Breeze sets a new standard for guest service in the aviation industry. The question is — who is next?

What to hear more about Breeze’s ‘Seriously Nice’ strategy? Danny Cox, VP Guest Experience, dives deeper into their digital first approach on the Radically Personal podcast.