Let's connect with Thomas Rocharz of Cape Air. Please leave your comments and questions for Thomas below. If you are interested in being featured in a member spotlight please email customerreference@8x8.com.
Tell us about your job.
As the director of contact centers, I oversee both our customer service as well as our internal helpdesk team that provides support for not only our airport services personnel and our reservations personnel, but also for any airline partners, as well as some baseline IT support for the broader Cape Air employee group.
Growing up did you know you'd become a customer experience leader?
I always saw myself in a management position. My parents like to talk about how, when I was a young kid, for two Halloweens I dressed up as a businessman, and my trick or treat bag was a briefcase. Ever since college, I knew I wanted to be involved in airline management. While flying around in the cockpit is an incredible experience, there's something to be said about the management of airline operations that has always interested me and driven me. I can't get enough of it.
What path led you to your current role?
I jokingly say that I come from a well grounded family. Neither one of my parents have ever flown. I was told about an aviation program when I was a junior in high school, and I thought I'd take a look at it. I was so enamored by the industry. I attended dispatch certification after college down in Dallas, Texas, and returned to the Boston area once my licensing requirements were complete. I started working for Cape Air as a flight follower and moved up the ranks in Flight Operations.
You spent almost 10 years in flight operations. What prompted you to transition to the customer service side of the airline?
I've always wanted to be involved in the management side of airline operations. Flight Operations Management is incredibly interesting. It's a very scientifically driven side of the airline. It's all based in regulations and weather analysis, safety, compliance, flight planning and performance analysis. But I really wanted to expand my horizons. If you're looking to get into a more senior position with any airline, what you need is a breadth of experience from across the different departments. So rather than staying in that niche of flight operations, I wanted to make sure that I got the customer facing experience as well from the contact center side. So it's a step on a journey in airline management, but it's really to make sure that I had a well rounded experience for the industry.
How did you navigate the transition to the Customer Service Center?
I came into our contact centers with extremely limited customer facing experience, with the end user as it were. But I did have years of experience in our flight operations side, interacting with our crew members, flight attendants, other departments, airport personnel. Although they're technically colleagues and coworkers, they're still customers. They're coming to my department for a service or a solution. You can translate that internal customer service to external customer service very readily. There's no difference between our internal customers and external customers, except that one of them's paying. But it's really people that are looking for assistance and trying to get the best assistance that they can. And so coming over to the contact center and applying that same philosophy to our external customers has worked out really well.
What did your experience in flight operations bring to the CX crew?
One of the things that senior leadership at the airline was eager to see was somebody from flight operations coming into a customer service role who can bring a deeper understanding of the technical operation side into customer service, to provide a little bit more context to the customers for why things happen, why things might go sideways when their plans don't pan out. It has proved to be beneficial. We are offering additional insight into why a flight was delayed or canceled, and although it doesn't completely fix the cancellation, giving them that additional information does provide solace to them in understanding there was a good reason for the delay. It's worked out really well.
How do you stay up-to-date on industry trends and where do you find professional inspiration?
One of the ones that comes to mind, and it's something that I subscribe to and I read regularly, is the Harvard Business Review. I really enjoy the publication. It's got a lot of valuable information, particularly from a management perspective. Of course, there's loads of articles on LinkedIn, keeping abreast of what peers in the industry are doing, problems they're encountering, and the solutions and the different approaches they're taking to it. Google is definitely one of my best friends. Let's see what the internet has to offer for potential solutions, or at least some insight into other people that have had similar issues arise.
What do you like most about 8x8?
Cape Air's agents adapted quickly to the system and found it easy to use. The barge, monitor, and whisper functions in particular have received continuous praise from our agents. It's been especially helpful in training our newer agents. For managers, configuring the system has been easy. 8x8's usability has been very, very enjoyable. We can make quick adjustments to the call flows or audio prompts in about 30 seconds and deploy them instantly.
What was the last book you read?
I read a lot of regulations! I suppose the last pleasure reading that I would have done - and this is probably going to sound odd - was the Bible. My partner and I are in the process of planning a fall wedding, and so we are selecting different passages from the Bible for the wedding service. Oh, and I did read this really wonderful book - "Seizing the Light: A Social & Aesthetic History of Photography" - on the history of photography. It was a history of the wet plate and dry plate collodion processes from old black and white photography. It was an interesting read.
On a personal note, what are your hobbies?
I'm a jack of all trades. I enjoy photography, baking, cooking, and automotive work. I love vehicle restoration, gardening, and farming. We have 14 chickens, half a dozen ducks on the way, and a couple of dogs. I grew up with horses, and we'd love to get some when we have some more time on our hands. Aside from the cooking and the baking, I enjoy anything that will get me outdoors.
Tell us about Cape Air's plans to deploy 8x8 Intelligent Customer Assistant (ICA).
We wanted to identify a couple of straightforward, baseline use cases we could launch with a strong footing. We're focused on providing assistance to passengers who have delayed or missing bags, helping them work through the process on how to file a claim, providing them with things like a hyperlink to the claim form that they would need to fill out, getting them in touch with the correct customer support agents. We're also looking to integrate this system with the functionality for our Freshdesk CRM application to enable customers to track their claim statuses throughout the processing journey.
Any future plans for ICA?
Ultimately we're looking at expanding our use cases using Intelligent Customer Assistant for both voice and text based communications that really limit the need of having to speak to a live agent…. AI-driven communications that offer reliable information on airline policies, fees, etc. refund policies, reimbursement policies to customers that can be completely automated. It would offer a faster level of service, a more consistent and correct level of service. Something that we've seen (from agents), in an effort to provide or to be more helpful rather, some of our agents will find that they may provide an answer that isn't 100% correct or perhaps a better word would be accurate. A customer might not fully understand what the agent meant by it and go about their day, only to send in a claim for something to find out it wasn't explained thoroughly enough. With ICA, having a self service system where a passenger could receive that information from an automated support system, we know it's going to be the right information every time. Even bigger than that was the agent support functionality from the ICA where it actively pays attention to conversations between our passengers and live agents, and predicts helpful knowledge base articles that it can offer up to the agent to help resolve passenger issues.
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