Chatbots are helping airlines communicate effectively with passengers and provide phenomenal experiences.

Virtual Assistants / Conversational Bots in Airline Industry Today

Virtual assistants help airlines improve their pilots’ productivity and efficiency by reducing repetitive tasks, such as changing radio channels, reading wind forecasts, and providing on-demand position information. Virtual assistants handle these repetitive tasks. Companies such as Garmin (USA) offer AI-enabled audio panels that are useful for pilots.

Airlines also use these assistants to improve customer service. For example – Virtual assistance with AI provides quick responses to simple questions (FAQs). These FAQs include flight status or services/offers (audio, video, Wi-Fi), reservations, baggage queries, seat availability, etc. This allows customer service representatives to attend to and respond to more critical questions than simple and recurring FAQs. These virtual assistants help passengers book tickets and plan trips, too. Almost all airlines have created apps to help customers across various travel-related tasks.

Conversational Bots in Customer Service and Retention:

Today, AI is helping airlines to optimize pricing strategies, raise customer satisfaction rates, customer retention & engagement, and improve the overall flight experience. Below is a list of potential AI use cases for the Airline industry:

Chatbot software and customer service automation: Kayak, a famous American travel booking agency, lets you plan your next trip directly from your Facebook Messenger app. The Chatbot understands simple questions and responds conversationally like human agents.

Conversational IVR: Enables calls for automation or semi-automation of the contact center’s processes, thereby increasing the agents’ efficiency.

According to Gartner, Advanced Virtual Assistants (AVA) are the next big step in today’s chatbots. AVAs are powered by natural language processing (NLP), generating conversational and intuitive sessions and semantic and deep learning techniques such as deep neural networks (DNNs).

Benefits of Conversational Bots in the Airline Industry:

AI chatbots are an innovative technological breakthrough that is gaining popularity worldwide. Userlike conducted a survey where 80% of the respondents confirmed that they had interacted with chatbots. Airlines are investing in chatbot development to address their critical operational and service-related issues. Below are some ways chatbots are making airlines smarter, better, and more efficient.

Improved customer service: Chatbots can handle customer inquiries 24/7 and provide real-time information in an emergency to the customer. At the same time, chatbots don’t have time zone and language barriers as they can be programmed to work according to your customer’s needs.

When customers have a chatbot that answers all their questions, it results in a better customer experience that strengthens the brand image.

Higher engagement: Chatbots can improve customer engagement by providing information, helping customers book airline tickets, fulfilling customer requests, and gathering all the information in one place. This engages the customer better than waiting a long time to contact an airline representative over the phone.

Revenue growth opportunities: Chatbots are increasingly evolving from customer support intermediaries to flexible solutions that can take advantage of sales opportunities. Airlines have increased conversion rates and sales by adding payment gateways, offers, and transaction capabilities to chatbots.

According to Juniper, 47% of consumers are open to using a chatbot to make a purchase, and chatbots will account for $112 billion in retail sales by 2023. This creates a tremendous opportunity to sell more in-flight services/other services to airlines.

Streamlined and integrated data access: Chatbots can collect all flight-related information and data and make it available on the platform that customers can access from anywhere and anytime. Chatbots can record all customer conversations and provide airlines with helpful information about their preferences, booking history, issues, etc. Optimized data access for end customers and airlines can make the industry more efficient.

Saves time and efforts: By integrating an omnichannel conversational bot, airlines can save time and effort handling customer inquiries. Because chatbots can continuously respond to simple and recurring requests 24/7, businesses can hire staff for more valuable tasks, activities, and issues. This saves time and energy and ultimately leads to efficiencies in customer service and engagement processes.

Economical query resolution solution for airlines: Developing a chatbot that works 24/7 is a much more cost-effective option for airlines than hiring and paying staff. Once set and implemented, chatbots can automate the request resolution process. This reduces the need to refer customer inquiries to a maintenance center, which reduces operational costs.

Conclusion

With the increasing investments by airlines in conversational AI, IGT Solutions has partnered with platform providers, such as Uniphore, and LivePerson, amongst others, that provide chatbot platforms along with intelligent insights and analytical capabilities, which IGT can further offer to their clients. These partnerships help IGT Solutions to create a base conversational platform for all existing and opportunistic clients and offer better and customized solutions. IGT has developed 12 different chatbots for a leading American Airline, improving customer satisfaction for the client. If you want similar results for your business, contact us today!

Author:

Apurva Sale is a Lead Business Consultant at IGT Solutions’ Intelligent Automation and Conversational Analytics Practice. She is an Analytics expert with 8 years of experience across Travel, Telecom and Retail domain. With a strong background of Business & Data Analytics, Apurva has extensively worked on elevating customer experience with Insights & sentiment analysis, Social Media Analysis & Insights. She can be reached at Apurva.sale@igtsolutions.azurewebsites.net

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Capturing Data to Facilitate Learning

With the ongoing use of Conversational AI, currently, customers have multiple channels of engagement to connect with a brand, thereby ensuring the generation of enormous volumes of unstructured data every moment through a multitude of platforms, including:

• Social Media – Facebook, Messenger, Twitter and other Engagement Channels
• Web & Mobile apps – Web and App for Sales and Service
• Voice Devices – Google Home, Amazon Alexa, Siri etc.
• Contact Centre – Dial in for Contact Centre Support

Leveraging Data to Derive Learning: Transforming this unstructured data into valuable and actionable business insights is a tedious process. This, especially without the right tools and platforms in place, becomes an impossible task. Therefore, the use of various text / speech analytics tools such as LivePerson, Verint, Clarabrigde, Nice, Lexalytics, etc. helps in analyzing the conversations, spot keywords, build rules, identify real-time customer sentiments, categorise conversations into positive or negative type, and analyse customer feedback and surveys. These tools are best leveraged combined with business intelligence experts, thus helping the companies derive actionable insights to improve:

• Customer Satisfaction
• Customer Service
• Operational Efficiencies
• Brand Campaigns
• Provide Personalised Offers, and
• More Insightful Customer Behaviours.

Social Media is a giant where we see comments and trolls; airline companies among many others receive millions of mentions each day. These mentions/comments range from traveler enthusiasts posting photos of clouds outside their windows to angry customers complaining about the service. Social media analytics (text analytics) helps the airline industry to gain real-time insights.

Amongst all comments/mentions around airline companies, the U.S based airlines are the ones that are usually discussed and have many mentions, however, they are mostly are negative. People complain about delayed flights, missing baggage, inflight & overall services. Winning this battle against the top competitors of the brand, while providing the best customer service can be challenging. Social media analytics, therefore makes the job easier.

Real-Time Feedback: Text/Speech analytics helps by alerting the management about all online events/talks. Passengers are online and are constantly talking about their experiences on various platforms. This data helps the team to analyze the information & dive deep into action with an emergency response arrangement. This is exactly how Southwest Airlines is using their social media listening command centre to overcome any crisis situation and deliver excellent customer service

Spotting trends: Like every other industry, the Airline industry also needs a loyal customer base and a strong online reputation. However, managing the business while keeping up with the constant online chatter and trends is tricky. Currently, the airline industry witnesses such patterns and trends.

For instance, looking at the current pandemic scenario and listening to the chatter online, there has been a lot of concern among the passengers with regards to safety measures/arrangements. In response to this trend, Delta Airlines has been announcing about safety protocols quite often over SMS, Emails, Chat & Voice, and Social media platforms.

The use of relevant and trending content is the most attractive tool to improve visibility of a brand. That’s how the giants in airline industry are making a difference and creating their niche

Handling the Crisis or Negative Feedback: Of all the chatter around in the airline industry, a predominant section is filled with negative comments. In the current digital age, one negative comment can cause a ripple effect to the brand’s image, this in-turn can cause considerable damage to the business. Especially with people keep complaining about poor service quality, boarding facilities, baggage queries etc.

Today, passengers also use third-party apps or agencies to book their travel plans & flights. Therefore, it becomes of utmost importance to please the customers through these third-party apps. Speech, text and voice analytics teams analyze the data generated through these channels as well for their business improvement insights.

Conclusion

This digital age has made the world more connected than ever: it has brought customers and companies closer. Every other company across the industries is using digital platforms along with Text Analytics, Speech Analytics, Social Media Analytics to stay relevant, stay connected, and offer maximum value to their customers and build brand image. Customers expect the same from the airline industry. Writing an update on Twitter about a delayed flight or upgraded safety measures goes a long way in building a trustworthy relationship with the customer. Additionally, Conversational Analytics helps the airline industry to stay focused on every important consumer insight in the most effective way possible.

Looking at the immense scope of speech & text analytics in the Airline industry, IGT has partnered with Nice – Nexidia to quantify the business problems and offer apt solutions.  Nexidia is an interaction analytics software that offers a one-stop solution to organize, analyze and transform the unstructured data from various data pools / databases into actionable insights for a brand. IGT is fully equipped with the right tools and business intelligence resources to provide intelligent insights to our clients. Amongst many projects, IGT is currently working with one of the leading American travel companies by providing a quantified and calculated statistical approach to pursue their business goals. Data mining & structuring, customer verbatim analysis, customer sentiment evaluation, root cause analysis of a business problem to improve customer satisfaction (CSAT) & metric driven operational efficiencies and inferential insights are few areas of IGT’s expertise.

Author:

Apurva Sale is a Lead Business Consultant at IGT Solutions’ Intelligent Automation and Conversational Analytics Practice. She is an Analytics expert with 8 years of experience across Travel, Telecom and Retail domain. With a strong background of Business & Data Analytics, Apurva has extensively worked on elevating customer experience with Insights & sentiment analysis, Social Media Analysis & Insights. She can be reached at Apurva.sale@igtsolutions.azurewebsites.net

The post Leveraging Conversation Analytics to derive Actionable Business Insights in the Airline Industry appeared first on IGT Solutions.

Business travel rebound

Many companies associated with business travel continue to struggle and wait for travel to return to normal. Face to face business meetings have been substituted with video calls and brands are realizing this as a long-term possibility. For brands that have taken a significant hit, the expenses for excessive business travel might not be a priority at all. Below are some possibilities companies will have to keep in mind if they are going continue their business travel activity:

• Employers will have to gear for a new reality, wellness for their employees. For brands that will continue business travel post-COVID, will need a renewed guide on their well-being so that their employees can aim to improve their resilience and incorporate certain travel habits to be able to complete their business travel activity with less stress
• Airport journeys will change and travel time will increase; with more emphasis on hygiene, health and resilience, frequent business travelers will have to be prepared for a longer wait and connectivity at airports due to alterations in flight schedule and frequent medical checks
• Companies that need to demonstrate products will need to cross continents from a sales perspective. The only thing that will affect them is probably if air travel becomes very expensive due to airlines participating in bailouts
• The stigma of assembling in conferences or large gatherings and meetings will also shift the balance of international business travel

As per a poll from Global Business Travel Association (GBTA) in April, 98% of its member companies have cancelled all international business travel. While this might be the case, many believe business travel will resume as virtual teleconferencing might not be sufficient for their business needs. However, it will take some extra benefits and solutions to make business travel seem feasible:

Loyalty Programs

To win back business travelers, hotels and airlines will turn to loyalty programs. There are likely to be more perks available for business fliers which could also be included in their corporate agreement.  Since both airlines and hotels are dealing with a reduced inventory, they will be in a position to promote extra benefits, however, this will be short lived as once air travel picks up again, these perks will become harder to give out.

Duty of Care Systems

As per Wikipedia, “Duty of Care is a legal obligation which is imposed on an individual requiring adherence to a standard of reasonable care while performing any acts that could foreseeably harm others.” Even after the pandemic is over, focus on employee health will become more prominent. Keeping a complete tab of an employee’s stay and travel can be made possible if companies actively implement the Duty of Care system. How this will help is it will give your company a competitor advantage. It will also give your employees satisfaction knowing who their emergency contacts are and that their business travel is in safe hands.

Flexible booking policies

When COVID-19 broke out, cancellations, refunds and vouchers were a trending topic. Companies were placed under huge pressure to handle high call volumes. The option of having flexible bookings and cancellations will give the business traveler peace of mind. This might also become a standard benefit that many industry players will incorporate.

Health insurance packages

During the pre-COVID era, travel insurance was an optional feature. With many people losing their bookings and money during the pandemic, travel insurance is being taken more seriously by the travel and hospitality industry. As an updated company policy, adding travel insurance to protect the health of their employees should be a mandatory measure. Even having a global health insurance coverage may come up as a new type of insurance.

While business travel may not completely disappear, it will see a decrease in post-COVID times, which might last for some time. Could this perhaps result in a new type of travel that includes both business and leisure? Or because our memories are so short spanned and we forget crisis quickly, we might just resume to pre-COVID business travel? It actually depends on how airlines and hotels showcase their hygiene measures and how actively they are a part of a global employee health safety system. Companies that have to continue business travel should be prepared with off-site medical assistance and invest in risk-free travel contracts. It will diminish not only the risk of losing money but also enable business continuity.

Author:

Gurmeet Oberoi is a researcher and writer of change tactics and technologies in travel and other verticals, she frequently posts across the digital ecosystem. With 9-yrs of experience in communications and marketing, Gurmeet has a passion for travel and reading among other things. She can be reached at gurmeet.oberoi@igtsolutions.azurewebsites.net

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