Experts of Experience - #25 How Breeze Airways is Proving You Can Create Superior Flying Experiences

Episode Date: April 10, 2024

 On this episode, Danny Cox, Vice President of Guest Experience at Breeze Airways, discusses the challenges airlines face in creating great passenger experiences. He emphasizes the need for airlines to let go of antiquated processes and mindsets and focus on. Danny shares how Breeze Airways is working to improve the airport experience and reduce stress for travelers. He also highlights the importance of partnerships and the impact they have on the overall guest experience. Plus, Danny discusses the role of leadership in guiding the team and fostering an empowerment mindset.Tune in to learn:What are airlines missing when it comes to great experiences?Making the airport experience easierWhy is it difficult to give control back to customers?How Breeze differentiates itself in the marketGuiding a customer service teamHard lessons in building a new business–How can you bring all your disconnected, enterprise data into Salesforce to deliver a 360-degree view of your customer? The answer is Data Cloud. With more than 200 implementations completed globally, the leading Salesforce experts from Professional Services can help you realize value quickly with Data Cloud. To learn more, visit salesforce.com/products/data to learn more.Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

What airlines need to be doing and need to be thinking is for every dollar they're investing in, a cool new way to grab the next customer. They probably need to reserve about 50 cents to say, what are some of our old processes we need to sunset? Your report shows that complaints in general are way up. Yes, we studied all of the DOT data and we found that even though air travel is still lower, consumer complaints have quadrupled. Sometimes traveling by air isn't fun at all.

You have to read the fine print when you're booking because a lot of changes have been made. She said she used to be okay with switching airlines, but not so much anymore because she doesn't want to end up on certain ones. Having mentalities of, we don't do it the way we've always done it, first and foremost,

is a critical piece to start thinking there. And secondly, who has solved this or something like this that we can copy? What can we learn from Amazon Prime? What can we learn from Uber in that way? If you ever have orgs that it's a conflict between revenue maximizing and the guest experience, I think that's got to be the biggest red flag of all time because those things have to come together. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood. Super quick PSA before we jump into today's exciting episode. If you enjoyed this episode or others, please, please, please let us know by hitting that subscribe button wherever you listen to your podcasts. Your subscribe will help us to continue

bringing you exceptional CX knowledge with the industry's best. So thank you so much for that. And without further ado, I'm going to introduce our guest today. We have Danny Cox, the Vice President of Guest Experience at Breeze Airways, where he spearheads the mission to make flying an experience that lives up to their slogan, seriously nice. Having previously spent many years at JetBlue, Danny brings deep knowledge of CX in the aviation space. So today we're going to dive into the intricacies of enhancing the flying experience, navigating industry challenges, and fostering an empowerment mindset within the organization. So let's get into it. Danny, how are you? So good, Lauren. Thanks for having me here. Thanks for doing this. It's an important

message you're getting out about experience. It's really what I live're getting out about experience. It's really what I live and breathe. So I'm so happy to have you on. My first question for you is what do you believe that most airlines miss when it comes to creating a great passenger experience? That is a tough question because I think at their hearts, I don't think they're actually missing it. They've just got so many roadblocks that have been put in their place with years and years of maybe slightly antiquated processes or slightly antiquated software that just make it so difficult to execute to it. I think what airlines in general need to be doing and need to be thinking is for every dollar they're investing in a cool new way to grab the next customer.

We call them guests here at Breeze. But to grab that next one, they probably need to reserve about 50 cents to say, what are some of our old processes we need to put the investment in getting rid of them because I think for the most part, it is that antiquated approach and that antiquated mindset that is what's getting in the way of it. If I can dive into one thing on it, one of my favorite things to say to folks are, I hate this term. I'll wait until the airport to do it. I just think that that is a horrible mindset for you as a traveler. You've traveled to where you're at right now. I travel whenever I can.

Any of the stuff that is saved for the airport to handle is just going to come at the most time crunch period. It's going to come at the most stressful period. Where are my keys to my car? All of that other conflicting things. And so pulling as much stuff out of the airport is one of my personal missions and one of our missions here to make it do it. That's just one example that we need to be pulling that stuff away to where we have elasticity of time, not to where we're very inelastic in our time. Once we get to the airport, it's inelastic. You got one mission, get on that plane. And I think we can all agree that I will speak for myself. Some of my most stressful moments

in my life have been in the airport thinking I had more time than I do. And all of a sudden, like every single thing goes wrong and I'm running to that gate. What is an example of something that you've been pulling out of the airport experience and having passengers address earlier? One of the things that we're really trying to do is remind guests. Breeze is an awesome new airline. We've only been flying for a couple of years now. We're not perfectly getting things figured out, but trying to give that seriously nice approach to it is that ancillary fees and customized travel experience, like what seat do I want?

Or I don't care about a seat. Am I bringing bags or am I not? So getting all of that, all of that stuff in a way, either in a bundled package early on where you recognize it because you get more multipliers of points early on to pull that out. And the reminder of, hey, if you do this in the time crunch, it's going to cost you more. If you do this now, you can really, really save some dollars on that one. That is one example. Another example is kind of really super, super broad. We don't have a call center at Breeze. We want to get our guests managing their travel experience much like they're managing their life, which is quick text. I just, before this podcast started, both of my wife and I are at work today.

And so it's who's going to pick up the kids. We're not making phone calls and doing that. It's quickly texting, hey, babysitter's got the kids from school today, that kind of stuff. Very similar mentality shifting it is in a time crunch. You can text us really quick and we've got a lot of good self-serve and helpful things that give you a guest an empowered experience to do that. But again, thinking about that stuff long term, how much of the stuff do you text? And you don't need an answer immediately, but the ease of putting it in text and being done with it until you want to come back to it versus when the phone and then kind of on the complete opposite side. But a really passion project of mine ends up being around disruptions do happen and challenges. And historically, the airlines that do a really, really good job of when a disruption happens is because they have a broad network and they can get you on a different flight a few hours later

or something like that. And airlines that like Breeze have less frequency have struggled with that. And so one of the things that we have tried to get an empowerment attitude because that loss of control after a flight is delayed a long time is really sometimes dehumanizing to a person and they just feel so out of control. And so instead of us taking an approach like airlines have historically done that have done this really well of, we will send you to this double tree in this area. We've got the hotel booked for you and doing it, kind of opening it up to our guests to say, we will reimburse a certain amount for this. You choose the hotel. You choose if you want to use those funds to try to book another airline.

You take some control back of the situation. We're sorry that this situation sucks, but you get to take some control back. And that has been a really powerful experience in a lot of ways with you don't have the mob mentality because not everybody is hovering there for one answer on what hotel are you putting me up in? And then everybody's waiting in that shuttle that has 12 seats for the next little while. but it's dispersing the group to where they want with them having a little more control and having a little bit better part of that experience. So I'm so glad that you bring this up because that piece of control is so incredibly essential, essential in any customer experience, but especially in something that is

so vitally important to our lives and can be so incredibly disruptive to our lives if it doesn't work out, which is flying and getting to a destination when we want to. I recently had an experience where I was flying one of my favorite airlines. I'm top tier status on this airline. I fly them a couple of times a month. Everything's always great. And we had one of those experiences where sitting on the tarmac for four hours, delay after delay after delay, and then the airline staff timeout and they won't be able to get to the destination and we cannot take off. And it is midnight and I'm in New York and I'm trying to get back to LA and there's no other flights. And because I fly this airline a lot and I think that the service is quite good, I was expecting to have a pretty seamless experience from here on out. And I was just shocked moment

after moment at how hard it was. And I had to wait in line for three hours to get that hotel voucher to go to that hotel that I did not want to go to. I ended up having to stay in New York for 24 more hours. It was just like, I just want to have a little bit of control. And I feel completely beholden to this experience. And I'm curious to know your perspective, having worked in the aviation industry for so long. What is so difficult about giving that control to passengers? I think it goes a little bit back to the technology and just with the technology,

how many processes you built around that limitation versus if you take a pause and maybe the pandemic, which I hated, but was the greatest gift because all of us who were at the start of Breeze had a chance to think what was really essential, what was really important. If you weren't beholden to technology that didn't let you understand that Lauren is your top tier status, hence, we're going to create a separate line for her to get her to the hotel quicker. But Danny over there, he paid our cheapest fare. We still love him, but we're going to do that. If you think like an airline and only ever think like an airline, but solving that problem, what can we learn from Amazon Prime? What can we learn from Uber in that one?

What do we do when we need to get somebody from point A to point B pretty quick? You know, how do we tie into that? Having mentalities of, we don't do it the way we've always done it, first and foremost, is a critical piece to start thinking there. And secondly, who has solved this or something like this that we can copy? I understand. I have a tremendous blessing. We were a brand new airline. We get to start. We didn't bring a lot of the systems in. But we are guarded every day against making sure we don't end up letting systems or that dictate what our guest experience is going to be. But that we try to push guest experience in front of every one of those to make sure that that is what it's meaning. And I think airline in general want to do that. It's difficult.

It's changing a lot of old systems and a lot of people, right? Like big old airlines have so many people working for them. Changing is hard. And I would imagine that's been an advantage for you and starting from scratch to say, how are we going to do this differently? And you have a blank slate to build on. We are so blessed with that. And I don't take it for granted. Just this morning, I met with a group of people who were excited at the onset of Breeze. And four and a half years ago, we sat down at this cute little place for breakfast and they asked a lot of questions. Danny, what do you need to help build out? What's going on? We're about to leave the airline industry if given the pandemic about to hit and all that kind of stuff that was going on. And as we sat down and as we reflected

on what was going on, it was that mentality of hungry to start with a clean slate and hungry to say, we learned a tremendous amount from the past. Let's not repeat any of the bumps or bruises that are there, but let's advance this forward. I'm not going to profess that Breeze is perfect at that yet, but we certainly are trying to put the effort into making that seamless. That's great. What are some of the ways that you really differentiate yourselves in the market? So the markets we choose, which I've always said, the smartest people at the airline are the people who can find cities to city that that makes money. And so our route planning team has done a tremendous job at finding with the changes that have happened in the industry over the last

five years, some underserved markets where the option was either an eight hour drive or a long layover over another airline's hub. And other airlines do a fantastic job. The Deltas, United, Americans, they do a fantastic job and they can get you anywhere in the world. But not everybody who takes every single trip needs the power behind them of take you anywhere in the world. Sometimes they need the power of somebody who wants to do Canton, Ohio to John Wayne Airport in Southern California. Well, Canton, Ohio has been an absolute fantastic place for us. And you could get from Canton, Ohio to that area, but you were probably going to have to fly through somebody's hub. So that's one differentiator. The second differentiator is the aircraft that we fly. Super fuel efficient,

super green, probably one of the most green aircraft there is out there. But with that fuel efficiency, it has the ability to take off and land on shorter runways, whereas you used to have to take off on these big old long runways. Well, if we can take off on shorter runways, we can go into the Provo and Ogden Utahs of the world versus going into the Salt Lake. And Salt Lake is perfectly served, greatly served by several airlines. But if you can fly into Provo and you can fly into Ogden, you can get that niche of people and you can stimulate. And that's probably the third way is that we're not stealing guests from other travelers. We're stimulating people who said, wait, I don't have to make that nine and a half hour drive down to Disneyland anymore. Now I can fly in my hometown to do it.

And so it's stimulating. That has been a real differentiator for us. I'd say those three areas are pretty key to us. That's great. I mean, as a passenger myself, whenever I'm going to areas that are, you know, less traveled or less well connected, it's always like, oh, this is so hard. So I can really see the benefit there of having an airline that will really connect the dots to the right places in those areas that are maybe less well serviced. I'd love to talk a little bit about leadership.

I can only imagine how you have fire drills all the time in this industry. And I'd love to understand a little bit about how you approach really guiding your team to deliver a great customer experience, no matter the situation. Yeah. So I'm sitting here in our corporate office. We're growing, growing. But I remember a day, probably much like today, where the snow-capped mountains were out the window behind me. And I remember thinking, to get the team that we want, is it going to be called customer service? And I'm like, I don't really overly like customer service because that puts somebody in the mindset of you are serving me. I am above you. We're not a partnership. And I'm like, maybe customer support, maybe something like that. And then it clicked with me as I was talking to an individual I was trying to recruit to come and help us because of their tremendous skill and what they were going to bring. And I said, just kind of off the cuff,

I said, well, first of all, we're not going to call them customers. We're going to call them guests. We want that feeling of we're welcoming them. And I don't want them to feel served. So the servant attitude, I have a problem, Lauren, you fix it. Serve me and you fix it. I want them to feel empowered. I want this group to feel like they are empowered. And I want the guests to feel like they are empowered. Nobody knows the problem that is trying to be solved more than the guest. And so the guest to have to overly articulate that or spend their time articulating that is demeaning is probably too strong of a word, but Lauren, you were in that delayed situation. You knew what you wanted to accomplish and you felt like there

were roadblocks being put up in front of you. And so I just didn't want to have that experience or I wanted to minimize that experience as best we could. So we started with a team, a team that felt or wanted to feel like I just needed to be empowered with some broad principles about how I empower the guest and how I guide them and how I direct them versus how they have a problem. They hand it to me. It's now my problem. I can either fix it or not hand it back to them. Did I fix it, Lauren? Did I not fix it? And it's, if I can stay there with them and if I can have the partnership, then I will truly feel empowered as a team member at Breeze. And if I truly feel empowered, I will look for every opportunity to then therefore empower the guests. And so the leadership principles behind all of this was truly getting to a simple set of guidelines and principle-based versus policies and rigidness to ensure that the team felt like within this range, I can guide the

guest to this option, this option, this option, and the guest will know quickly, yep, that one works best for me. That one works best for me. Or I can interact with the guest and the guest can say, this is what I'm really trying to do. And it's like, yeah, that roughly fits within our guidelines. Let's just guide them to them and help remove any barriers in doing that. And so that's a big emphasis and a big focus we're trying to put into the team growing. I want to underscore something that you said. Empowered teams create empowered customers. We need to have that feeling from the inside in order for our teams to be able to pass it on. It's like, how can we fill their cup so that it can fill our customers' cups?

It starts with that. What are some of the ways that you've really worked to create that empowered team? Well, the first thing I love that you said, fill our cup. This morning, it was at a breakfast with some very early founders of the team and recognizing them. Every week, it's in forums where they help us have feedback and they get to chime in and say, hey, did you know in the newest app that was just released, this and this and this happened and working really close with the IT team

and them getting to see their feedback go to the IT team and having an awesome IT team that's open to listen before they roll out a product and having that symbiotic relationship that they're better, the IT team is better

because they listen to the people who listen to the guest every single day. And we're going to get better tech out because they have an influence over that. The newest group that just came out in our guest empowerment team, these newest get team members came and saw a process that happens after we have to do a schedule change, which means looking out about three or four months where we have to do a schedule change, which means looking out about three or four months where we have to adjust around based on a new weather forecast or winds or an aircraft delivery is late as a brand new airline. And this newest group of team members said, why are we handling the schedule changes this

way, given that this is the principle you taught us? And for all of us who have been here for a while, it was like, we don't have a good answer for that, but we needed new eyes on it and we needed the feedback. And so creating that opportunity where the newest hired person can come in and question a process me, given the principles that you said we wanted to have, can we question it? We changed it like that because we had all just been living with it because it was what it was. But that ability to ask why is such a thing. And I think that group of individuals are going to love their job because they found something and contributed, and they're going to then serve and support our guests and empower our guests in the most powerful way possible. When you're using Salesforce to

tackle your company's most important goals, failure is not an option. At Salesforce, they get it. They've made their most highly skilled advisors, Salesforce CTOs available to help you with expert guidance and implementation support at every step of your journey. Learn more about Salesforce CTOs at sfdc.co slash professional services. If we are able to feel like we are moving the company forward with our thoughts and opinions and insights, we feel so much more engaged in our jobs. And I think it's really special what you're sharing here is that even from the first day of being on the team, there's a space created where they felt okay sharing or asking a question that kind of like maybe have been counter to what they were

being taught. Right. And that says a lot that they were actually willing to say, Hey, we actually see some inconsistencies in what you're, what you're saying to us. Why is that? And like you said, they are likely to be much more engaged in their job because you immediately heard them and addressed what it was that they were saying. You know, Lauren, think of the opposite. And I bet you we both have the experience where it's that first day. This is what you do. You don't question it. We figure this process out. Just do this exactly this way. And it has a completely opposite feel to it. And you may still enjoy that job, but you don't feel empowered and you don't love the job.

Completely. I mean, if you think about, I always like to think of the employee experience, just as we will think about the customer experience. I take companies in my consulting work, I'll take companies through the customer experience end to end. So we can really understand where are friction points here, or how can we further engage our customers at every different phase and touch point that we have with them. And I like to do the same thing with the employee experience, because if we think about it, like if we acquire a new customer and then the onboarding is like, just kind of flat, like do this, you're, you feel completely disempowered and your engagement levels just went from being really excited to kind of bored.

And you need to create the same level of excitement that you want to for your customer, for your teams. If someone starts on their first day and they just get a manual that says, here's how to do it, like press these buttons, the likelihood of this employee lasting in the company for a long time, let alone being engaged and empowered so that they can then pass that engagement and empowerment onto the customer is quite slim. So we should think about how do we really build that excitement with our new employees from the moment we introduce ourselves to them throughout that onboarding process and throughout their employee experience.

I truly believe that these two things, customer experience and employee experience, are hand in hand. And we can really learn from both sides of the coin and how we can improve those experiences. So true. So you're a new airline. I'm sure there has been a lot of learnings that you've come into in your last four years of building Breeze. What's one hard lesson that you've learned recently that has had an impact on the business? Oh, man. Our partners range from DOT, FAA, down to the airport municipalities. And no airport

is ran exactly the same because sometimes it is a municipality that's ran by a city or a county. And just the differences that go on with there to then our awesome, awesome business partners that are interacting with our guests on our behalf in a lot of our airports. My team's partners are the flight attendants that are on there because if the tone that my team sets is totally different than the tone that is being set by the flight attendants on there, that can create an awkward or inconsistent guest experience. And as soon as you have an inconsistent guest experience, they start to think, what can I depend on and what can't I depend on? There's no uniformity, no standard to this.

And then it just falls apart. And so I would say the number one challenge that needs constant intention is internal and external partnerships. Where you get your airplane and aircraft from to where the people who are pulling the jet bridge away from the plane, every one of those partnerships is super, super critical for alignment and value. Yeah. Such a huge puzzle to put together. I can only imagine. What are some ways that you really nurture those partnerships, both internal and external? One of my favorite ways in which we've nurtured this partnership with that one, it comes to mind is our airport team members, who a lot of them are external business partners. Because of our infrequency in certain

airports, we may not be the best employer if it was Breeze hiring the people there because we have one flight a day or two flights a week kind of thing. But if we can partner up with a business partner that's serving other airlines there, that person can have a better employment experience. But we want to make their experience when they interact with Breeze to be the very best that it is. And so they prefer to be on the Breeze account. We just did one of the most nurturing, powerful things I think we did just recently was recognize them for performance done really well when it came to handling bags, turning our aircraft on time and starting the day with getting the aircraft out on time. From a traveler, I think you would admit this, but a fair part, if not more than half of the entire experience is based on did I get to where I wanted to be on time? And the other experience, you may remember that the flight attendant was really nice on board,

or you may remember that you got a smile from a gate agent. But all that kind of melts away if you were there five hours late or you got an extra bonus stay in New York, like you mentioned on that one. And so recognizing these frontline team members for their work that they had done and showing up, it wasn't a lot. We're an airline that's starting out struggling and fighting to make a profitability. And so it didn't take a lot, but showing up for them and showing them that what mattered most to our guests mattered most to us and them delivering what mattered most to our guests was a critical piece.

Around Halloween, it's a little corny, but we called it the bag of treats because we did a very specific one around properly handling baggage. And so the three teams that won it based on the size of the big airports, medium airports and small airports. I showed up with a bag full of trick-or-treat type candy on the last day of October on who had won, who had done the best at doing that. And just showing up, it's not a big thing, but it's an opportunity for them to get recognized and feel powerful for what they have done. And connecting that back to rewarding them for something that then helps the guest have a better experience because showing up without your bag is not seriously nice. Showing up late is not seriously nice, but reinforcing those

specific things was a really fun way fostering those partnerships. Completely. A little recognition goes a really, really long way. For sure. I'm curious to know when it comes to your customers and your guests. I love that you corrected it. Thank you.

Gold star for you. I think the word customer, I mean, we call it customer experience because it's a general term, but I'm a huge fan of rebranding the term customer

to who they actually are in the ecosystem that you are providing. So for your guests, how do you go about capturing their feedback and then acting on it within your organization? Oh, this is we may spend the rest of the time on this one because I don't say my full title. What I started out being here is, but guest insights is a stapled on part of mine. And so we, we're strong proponents of the NPS score and measuring every single flight. And, you know, I mentioned that the route planners are the smartest folks at your organization because they're finding it. I would say tied with them or almost tied with them or maybe neck and neck with them are our Power BI team that are helping connect all of these data points.

Our Breeze business intelligence team just does such a fantastic job of grabbing all the dispersed data that there is out there that exists. Because Lauren, the passion that I have about asking a guest what their experience is at the end and the joy I feel when they take the time to share with us through a survey or through reaching out to our guest empowerment team to say, hey, I had this really good experience or, hey, I had this really bad experience. You guys were really close, but this is where I missed it. That's powerful to me. Super powerful. More powerful to me is then connecting that data or connecting that whole entire flight. Okay. Lauren gave us this very valuable piece of

feedback. I wonder what the other folks around her felt like or what the other folks on that plane. And then with our Power BI team to then dissect that down to say, well, what flight crew was on that one? What aircraft was that on? What were the weather conditions of that day? What was the delay or not delay experience? And so combining then all of that data in there to almost get predictive and realizing and saying, all I need is a couple of alarmons on board to tell us it wasn't a great experience. We then correlate all that data to, hey, wait a minute. Lauren always has a really good experience when one of these four flight attendants are on board.

These four flight attendants need to know they're doing a fantastic job. That's great. Lauren always has a really great experience when she's flying on one of our aircraft that just recently came from the deep clean process that we do multiple times a year. Wow. Right after our deep clean of the aircraft, cleanliness is super important to Lauren and persona, Lauren persona that we spread out through that. And so it's starting with that data with asking the guest and having like a flag in the ground there, but then circling all of this data around it to go to correlate and say, really Lauren's experience was she's on our oldest aircraft, our aircraft that has had the hardest time coming through one of our maintenance cleans. We've had this flight crew, all the flight crews at Breeze are awesome and the very best, but these ones might've had a bad day that day or something. And then correlating

that through to where that stuff and that information can get coached. Very early on, we're pretty at the high level of this station has this NPS score and they have this NPS score when they're on time and this NPS score when they're delayed. We're pretty infancy, but our ability with the business intelligence team to then take that out down to all of these different criteria, down to this pilot crew, the captain and first officer, when they fly together, we get the highest NPS scores in the system. We need to recognize them because what they're doing is contributing and helping. Yep. I mean, it's one thing to ask for the feedback, which everybody should always do. But it's another thing to do what you're speaking about, where you're really like taking that data and correlating it down to the specific situations at play, which, I mean, I can't

even imagine being in the airline industry because of the number of different situations and weather and airports and people, all these things making this very complex system. Can you tell us a little bit about how you've built this business intelligence engine? I'm just so curious to know, because it's a lot of unstructured data. And then being able to come down to say, when these components are at play, we create a great experience. How have you gotten there? This group of people that have had some experience in forming airlines is a great start to have. And people that are quick to say, we really loved what we did over there, but we've got to do something different the next time is a second thing. But very early on, the conversations, master data management, all of these were conversations before we even had the name of an airline.

It was when we were still a project, but we all knew that data was going to play such a big, big role. Now, none of us, with the exception of maybe Kyle Smith in the very early group, was smart enough to really know how some of these things connect. But we knew who to ask. And so I like to give that first group of eight credit, knowing that they needed to do this. If they didn't know how APIs work, they needed to know what APIs were. And they needed to know what all these different things and what the challenges of getting your data into a common data lake were. We didn't need to know how to solve it, but we needed to know it was a problem. And then we needed to be smart enough to get the right people to come along and do it. And fortunately, the Power BI team, the tech team, I've given some shout outs to. And Trent Porter, our CFO, has always been hungry,

hungry for data. I report up through the CFO and he's just hungry for data. And so this has been a part of his career that he's always sought this kind of stuff. And so to have your top people worried about this type of data for the guest experience, because it doesn't matter who you are in the organization. When you recognize that a better experience means to higher revenue leads to lower costs. You've kind of made everybody kind of happy on that one, because when you use data and you're really smart about it, it becomes pretty easy to build ROIs for something. Why are you changing the seat configuration on the plane? Well, because it'll maximize revenue. How do you know it'll maximize revenue? Because our guests are telling us this

seating configuration isn't ideal for them. They're telling us in their words and they're telling us in their behavior. And we have those two data points. We change the configuration and make it better on that one. So the curiosity for it was such a critical piece to make sure it happened. Yeah. I mean, it needs to be coming from the top. I know I've worked in organizations where there was kind of a mindset of like only track what's absolutely essential right now, which, yes, it's always a balance between not spending effort on things that aren't bringing you immediate results.

But then there's the long-term plays of the more interactions we have with our customer at every stage of the business, the more data we have to learn from and can kind of pull together to say, okay, we noticed that when these things are happening, revenue decreases over time. And so how can we prioritize that? So I really respect that curiosity for data and capturing it, managing it, and then getting really curious about how you can use it. Yeah. If you ever have orgs that it's a conflict between revenue maximizing and the guest experience, I think that's got to be like the biggest red flag of all time because those things

have to come together. You're not maximizing your revenue because your guests are telling you somehow that's not happy. So figure this out. And you're not having the greatest guest experience because you're charging them for stuff that they don't care about or something like that. Customer experience and revenue go hand in hand. I don't care what you say. It is connected and we need to look at the two. Well, Danny, thank you so much. A couple last questions for you. Are there any resources like blogs or podcasts

or thought leaders that you really love to follow when you think about, just to help you think about customer experience or guest experience? I really love our partner, Gladly. They have done such a great job at making the dream of a multi-channel contact center without telephony come to work. And Joseph over there does a radically personal podcast, which is one that I just enjoy because maybe

it's because we're like-minded and you want to hear somebody who thinks like you, makes you feel smarter or something like that. That is one that I really enjoy. And then just the stretch yourself, Stephen Dubner's Freakonomics podcast is just like, I would never pick up a magazine of any of the topics that he starts with, but I find myself stretching my mind and applying it to the guest experience because it is such a different way of looking at something that's maybe standing right in front of my face for so long because it stretches it. And then that helps my mind open up to think about, have I thought about the guest experience in that diverse of a way type of thing? So it's not directly like a customer experience or guest experience type discipline as much as what it

does for opening my mind to start thinking of things different and stretching things different is powerful. Completely. And I think we've actually touched on that a couple of times in this conversation around how we can gain inspiration from different industries or different applications that we can then bring back into our own businesses. So my second last question to you is, I'd love to hear about a recent experience that you've had with a brand that left you impressed or inspired. What was that brand and what was the experience? I hope you're going to take about 25 or 30 pounds off of me when this goes live. But I'm a bigger guy and I know I'm a bigger guy. And so sometimes get a little self-conscious about that. And so clothing can be a pretty uninspiring situation for me. Duluth Trading Company, for some reason, is my happy place. I probably brought by something once

a week from Duluth because it's high quality. It fits. It's stretchy. Heavens knows that's a great thing. And because I have one iota of a problem with it, I took a pair of pants back to them that was three years old because the pocket, the started to, the thread started to come out. So there was a hole in the pocket, not like worn through the fabric because I think they make their fabric bulletproof so you can't ever wear it through it. But it just came unstitched. I took it back to them three years old, zero questions asked. Zero questions asked. And so just that whole, not that every brand out there has to be my therapist or anything like that, but the whole element of it worked for me and it fit for

me and every aspect of it fits. Now I pay more than I'd like to pay for those clothes, no offense, Duluth, but I do because it hits everything else. And so you go into the guest experience and the revenue maximizing, I'm walking proof. Literally the shoes I'm wearing are Duluth, the pants I'm wearing is Duluth, the shirt is not, the jacket's branded Breeze, of course, but it's one of those things where I can say there's a brand that is giving them revenue, maximizing opportunity on me because they get it. So that's my brand. Completely. I love it. It's very passionate response. I can tell how much you, you love that brand. And it really goes to show creating a great experience, creating a space that you can feel like yourself in,

in a space where you will have your issues solved is really great and something that we can all take inspiration from. Last question for you. What is one piece of advice that you think every customer experience leader should hear? Don't get defensive and care enough to listen. Anybody who's willing to pause at all to give you any piece of feedback, whether it's Michael, who was at the airport recently, screamed at me in the face. I had spittle all over me. He just needed to be heard. So don't get defensive on that. They care enough to share that with you and seek that feedback. Listen for it. Find what it is from. Because we all want the feedback to come in a nicely packaged. My experience was great except for this one little thing. And we want that one

little thing to be really easy and cheap too. But that's not why we're passionate about the experience. That's not what we're doing. It's because we're curious enough to care about feedback coming. And we need to care about enough of a way to not be defensive in however it comes. And if someone is angry or upset, they have a reason for it. And we will only get better if we actually take a chance at listening. 100%. Beautiful advice. Thank you so much, Danny. It's been wonderful having you on the show

to share about your experience in the aviation industry, about creating a great guest experience and about listening to feedback. So really appreciate you coming on and I hope you have a beautiful day. Thank you so much. Thanks for all you're doing. You are a business leader with vision. You've seen the future as an AI enterprise thriving with Salesforce AI and data, and it is bright. Getting there? It's a little fuzzier. Don't worry. Salesforce CTOs are here to work side by side with your team and turn your AI and data vision into a reality. We're talking expert guidance and implementation

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