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-'It takes a village' As United Airlines’ chief customer officer, Linda Jojo is focused on serving the airline’s passengers. But to do that well, she focuses much of her work on another stakeholder: the frontline United employee.
Jojo joined United as chief information officer in 2014 and stepped into the CCO role last July. Earlier in her career, she held multiple CIO roles in the machinery, telecommunications, and utility industries. The CCO position was new to her—and it’s a role at the center of the airline industry's overhaul since the onset of the pandemic.
“We’re coming out of COVID a very different airline than when we went into COVID,” Jojo says.
An early experience that demonstrated to Jojo the importance of building for the frontline employee was the rollout of United’s Travel-Ready Center, a platform for passengers to upload their COVID documents. While executives expected the tool to ease congestion at the airport, the check-in desks remained as crowded as ever because employees on site were rechecking travel documents, unsure they could trust that the app had verified them. “It was the a-ha moment that said, ‘It’s great to have that tool. But if we don’t make sure our employees know it’s going to work, we’re going to regenerate some of that work,’” she says. The platform was used by 55 million passengers in 2022.
Jojo has applied that insight to additional products, including United’s “connection saver” feature that relies on real-time data to decide whether to hold a flight for connecting passengers and a new “family seating” option that displays additional seating options for families that are booking with young children.
“It takes a village to make sure the process works,” she says. “The more we can enable our frontline to make great decisions in the moment, the better we’re going to be. You can’t edict a whole bunch of stuff from headquarters and think it’s going to roll all the way through.”
Her goal moving forward is to provide transparency to the customer; when things go wrong, to at least show them why and what the solutions are. “Just like customers want transparency, you have to give that transparency to employees that are serving the customers,” she says.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
@_emmahinchliffe
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