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

The post Revolutionizing Engagements by Conversational Bots in Airline Industry appeared first on IGT Solutions.

With technological advancements, decision making has also changed. With many companies offering comparable deals, and various types of offers catching a trend, consumers today have numerous options to choose from.

Gartner report predicts that 85% of customer interactions will be managed without humans by 2021. 

The travel and retail industry is getting better with the application of technologies like AI (Artificial Intelligence) and ML (Machine Learning). Conversational automation is one such technology that is gaining momentum by creating simulating human-like conversation through chatbots and voicebots. Chatbots are computer softwares that act like virtual text assistants to communicate with users using text messages. They are intelligent and can comprehend even vague queries submitted by users like ‘Australia hiking places’ or ‘Red shoes online’. They can be integrated in websites and mobile applications to help automated regular tasks and maintain customer service standards. Through their customer oriented communication, chatbots are transforming the travel and retail industry by connecting with users on a personal level.

Let’s look at some areas where chatbots are helping transform the customer experience

Travel assistance

From suggesting destinations to recommending closest airports, chatbots have become the go-to personalized assistants for many travelers. Instead of making innumerable calls and emails, customers can use the efficiency and swift response time that chatbots offer in making the right travel choices based on nuances of human dialogue, preferences and budgets. Furthermore, they can send out alerts about any delays in flights or cancellations and offer features in line with the company’s travel policy.

Ease of ordering online

As per Hubspot, 47% of consumers would not only prefer to receive recommendations through chatbots but also be willing to make purchases through them. While having a personalized offer is what consumers look for, chatbots also offer guidance in an online ordering process. In comparison to a physical store, the attention span of online shoppers decreases significantly, which is where chatbots offer an advantage by providing instant ordering assistance.

Feedback collection

Chatbots are not just meant to act like human representatives, they are there to give a holistic solution to the customer. While they are known to provide pre-travel or purchase assistance, they are also extremely useful in post-sales services like collecting feedback from users or asking them to leave reviews. They can automatically send reminders to customers to share feedback of their online experience in the form of ratings and reviews. In the process, if the user is unhappy with the service, it can address the grievance right there and address the issue in the moment.

As per Global Market Insights, the overall market size for chatbots worldwide would be over $1.3 billion by 2024. 

Multilingual Support

Chatbots are conversation tools that have been made to assist customers by understanding their requirements in the broadest possible sense. The digital revolution has broadened the internet user base including large number of non-English speakers. While many of us are used to speaking in English, we feel more at ease when we speak in our native language. Chatbots can be designed to be multi-lingual, which means, you can reach audiences in other countries and offer assistance in their language. Chatbots are anyway able to handle a large number of queries; with multi-lingual assistance, the bots would be able to handle specific and large number of queries efficiently and increase presence in high demand regional markets.

According to a Chatbot Customer Service Study by Invesp, 64% of internet users say 24-hour service is the best feature of chatbots.

Competitive Advantage

Chatbots can analyze a customer’s intent through their tone, choice of words, the pages visited on a website and the journey made on apps. Chatbots can meet the needs of a customer by keeping them engaged, providing high-quality experience and meeting their needs. They can encourage direct bookings and fully support the booking journeys. Based on past travel data, they can also up sell and cross sell by delivering the messages in a natural manner which would appeal the user. Similarly, in retail, chatbots can customize products based on their browsing history and products placed in their shopping cart. With a fast response rate, they can assist several customers at the same time, with tailored offers and 24X7 support which would contribute to the productivity and financial results of a company.

According to a study by Chatbots Life, the top 5 industries profiting from the incorporation of chatbots are real estate (28%), travel (16%), education (14%), healthcare (10%), and finance (5%). Another study by eCommerce chatbot statistics states that over 70% of chatbots accessed will be retail-based by 2023.

 It is highly likely that chatbot technology will be a preferred choice for many travel and retail brands as it will continue to improve customer experience and cost efficiency. IGT has helped several clients receive positive results with its conversational automation solutions. By using cognitive services like Natural Language Processing (NLP), Speech-to-Text, Text-to-Speech and Sentiment Analysis from industry partners like Miscrosft LUIS, IBM Watson and Google Dialog Flow, we have enabled our clients transform their customer service experiences. Our engagement models are flexible and can be customized to suit specific needs of the customer.

You can read more about our chatbot service here: https://www.igtsolutions.com/services/automation/conversational-automation/

Sources:
www.enterprisersproject.com/article/2019/12/rpa-robotic-process-automation-2020-5-trends
www.backlinko.com/chatbot-stats
www.smallbizgenius.net/by-the-numbers/chatbot-statistics/

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

The post Chatbot: Enabling Enhanced Customer Service in Travel and Retail appeared first on IGT Solutions.