Delta Airlines Red Coats 2.0

Delta’s Red Coats were an exemplary form of customer service – if you had a problem you looked for one and easily found one with their distinctive jacket even in the thousands of passengers at an airport. 

Delta is bringing them back but not with the technology of old – check the brick of the radio in the photos from the 70s!

So I asked Ranjan Goswami, Director- Customer Experience Planning & Development how the new Red Coat will delight his now much tech-savvier passengers.

His response

“Our Red Coats will still be armed with radios for communication between themselves/gates/check-in desks and handhelds designed to aid during irregular operations, but also usable during regular ops.

The handheld piece (the Motorola MC75) is what is new and below is the functionality we are starting with:

• Scan customer boarding passes to receive PNR displays to show rebooking, standby, and gate information
• Check flight availability for any departing flights
• Access real-time flight information, customer check-in status, special service requests (wheel chairs, special meal, etc) and misconnected customer lists
• Review standby and cleared lists for all flights
• Add special service requests (wheelchair, special meal, etc.) for a customer
• Take secondary control to assist a gate agent in the boarding process by changing to “boarding mode”
• Identify if amenities were authorized for the customer
• Print new itineraries with bar code and new gate/seat assignments; this new document allows customers to board

Here are the features the handhelds will receive in 4Q10:

• Domestic lobby check-in (to purge lines) including check baggage, fee collection and the printing of boarding documents (this is with an attached credit card swipe to the handheld)
• Link station radios into the handheld so that employees only need one device (vs. current 2 devices – one radio, one handheld)
• Print service recovery amenity vouchers
• Add customers to the stand-by list

And here is a peek of what’s in planning stages: Proactive solicitation for denied boarding compensation – this way the Red Coat can roam the gate area to ask for volunteers and provide the rebooking and compensation; this will allow boarding to proceed in parallel”