Technology advances in social media and mobile have given travelers unprecedented power to demand better customer service across the entire travel experience. Travelers prefer the immediacy of self-services and have been conditioned to expect quick responses and resolutions to their needs and concerns, making it more difficult for airline organizations to address each and every inquiry with traditional tools and channels.
Chatbot technology offers an instant resolution to most of the typical traveler queries and creates an unprecedented quality of passenger engagement through personalized traveler experience. Instead of picking up a phone, passengers might turn to a chatbot in Facebook Messenger (or Skype, Whatsapp, Viber or any messaging app of preference) first, knowing a chatbot is always available and is able to provide some assistance. Airlines could use chatbots to deal with the initial influx of requests. Advances in cognitive technologies, such as natural language dialog capabilities, allow airline organizations to offer conversational capabilities, letting their travelers check statuses and make reservations through natural language text and speech.
Airlines that capitalize on chatbot technologies can expect to build their brand, improve sales, minimize customer churn and reduce service costs.
Getting started with a conversational journey
The airline travel ecosystem has more than a handful of critical customer business processes and also a very long funnel compared with other industries. In the early stage, travelers are typically unsure of the details of their trip, looking for flights to various destinations and time periods. Questions at this stage range from “Can I get vegan meals on my international flight?” to “What is the baggage limit on international flights?”. Travelers further down the funnel might be business travelers or frequent fliers who may need less guidance but may be looking for a different kind of information, such as “How many more segments I need to take to become a platinum member?”. As both type of travelers get close to their flying date and time, their questions may change to “Which gate do I need to get to?” and the more typical “Is my flight on schedule?”
Travelers at each stage have very different information requirements, so it is very important for airlines to understand the traveler’s perspective on how to engage passengers and design a better conversational flow that encapsulates multiple variables:
- Anticipate the traveler’s expectations and needs during each part of the journey
- Understand how travelers navigate across the interaction-points
- Build an understanding of what is working and what needs to change
- Prioritize important gaps and opportunities to improve the passenger engagement experience
- Plan to fix root-cause issues, re-wire business functions around passenger interactions and redesign the customer service touchpoints for a better end-to-end experience
Engage travelers with assisted-booking bots
An intelligent conversational flow enabled by chatbots across multiple customer touch-points is essential to driving better customer experiences. Assisted selling bots can reduce the number of searches a passenger has to make to get to his or her choice of ticket. It could increase satisfaction which, in turn, will help boost loyalty and top-line revenue. And for corporate travelers, chatbots can drive more relevant, policy-compliant bookings as the bots have access to travel history, as well the corporate policies.
Personalized experiences
Delivering a personalized experience is what can set chatbots apart from other customer engagement platforms. A truly personalized platform will successfully eliminate the need to sort through a cascade of travel options and provide accurate travel options very quickly. A chatbot platform can provide that kind of experience by integrating with traveler preference systems and other analytical models.
Human agents are not as efficient at sifting through data quickly. Chatbots can look at a passenger record and determine that the passenger always flies business class, travels with kids, or prefers more leg room. It can also then incorporate a customer’s location and other contextual attributes to deliver a next best action or offer. For instance, a chatbot can engage a traveler by an iBeacon encounter at the airport and offer choices for traveler’s food and beverage needs.
Chatbots can also be deployed in authentication scenarios to restrict entry into an airline concierge. For example, an intelligent chatbot can look up the travel itinerary, validate the credentials and open the concierge door via. a Bluetooth enabled mobile key.
Channel agnostic bots: a conversational platform approach
The travel marketplace is rapidly changing, and airline organizations can no longer afford to spend years laboring away in isolation to achieve perfection with home grown chatbot development kits. They must invest in a robust conversation platform that provides channel interaction layers for Facebook Messenger, Skype, Slack and We Chat – to name just a few.
Designing an accelerated customer service and assisted selling conversational platform requires not only developing channel-agnostic intelligent chatbots to support multiple conversational flows, but also requires integration to data and core systems, and automation of CRM and customer care backend processes with application programming interfaces (API). Capturing their full value potential depends on how good businesses can integrate people and technology across the organization, and deliver those capabilities via nimble, cloud-first channel agnostic enterprise solutions.
In the travel industry, better customer service strongly correlates with customer loyalty and faster revenue growth. Chatbots provide airlines with a surefire strategy to add scale and consistency to its customer service efforts, by serving millions of passengers, through new digital channels, on demand, 24/7.
Srinivas Kasthoori is the Associate Vice President of Travel, Transportation and Hospitality Industry Group at Mindtree. Srinivas is a dynamic business leader who has an impressive 20-plus-year track record of serving travel, transportation and hospitality clients, driving business transformations of their enterprise applications, data and analytics landscapes, and their customer’s digital, mobile, and cognitive experiences. As AVP in Mindtree's TTH Industry Group, he is responsible for business development, consultative sales and delivery of Mindtree's digital solutions, and application management and technology service offerings.
