I think a great deal of the UA/CO merger and integration can be characterized by, "had the right idea, but completely botched the execution." The IT integration is a great example. Looking back now, a decade+ on, it was arguably the right move, but it was like taking 10 steps back just to start moving forward. The learning curve for agents, the loss of many familiar shortcuts/features and the time to carry out basic tasks was frustrating for users of a mature, well-developed system in United's Apollo/FastAir/FastRes interface, and even those accustomed to the CO way lost some functions and ease of use in the transition to the merged SHARES/EZRes.
Post-merger United also dropped the ball when it abandoned development of FastSHARES (later Aero) before the rollout and brought everyone back to stone-age native SHARES on the IT cutover date. I believe it ultimately cost United business in the short and intermediate term. It might have been a different story if the integration was held off until FastAir-style overlay could be developed for ease of use, but so much of management's compensation was tied to hitting merger integration dates that missing targets was not an option.
With the right people and leadership in place, the flexibility of the platform has actually enabled UA to innovate among US carriers, and I think United's IT (including self-service functionality) is better than the competition. The consensus is that United's basically-unrestricted license to SHARES allows it to do more in-house development than United could have with its Apollo license. Philosophically, this is very much "UA of old" thinking ("let's build a custom system in-house rather than buy an off-the-shelf product").
Originally Posted by
lincolnjkc
But the architecture of SHARES (or rather the entire bundle of technology that UA uses with SHARES at the center) has lent itself to enhancement -- not always customer-positive enhancement but I digress -- and then the Aero overlay made things easier for agents (even some 20+ year CO agents I've chatted with prefer Aero for transactions because it automates a lot of the individual steps and seems to cover 90%+ of the situations that are encountered -- there's a new overlay in progress called Jet that I'm hearing mixed opinions of and to be honest it's not completely clear to me if the intent is to completely replace Aero or just further streamline the most frequently used functions in Aero.
I believe the purported advantage of Jet is that it is mobile-optimized. United wants to de-emphasize the podium and give agents more functionality on iPads/iPhones to serve as "roving CSRs". One can also look at that as a way to reduce/optimize airport staffing demands. You can see this in action at some of the newer holdroom designs at ORD, where the podium is clearly designed for a single agent position.