Srinivas Kasthoori – Associate Vice President of Travel, Transportation and Hospitality Industry Group at Mindtree
Photo credit: Mindtree
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 such as Chatbots, letting their travelers check status and make reservations through natural language text and speech.
The airlines that capitalize on chatbot technologies can expect to build their brand, improve sales and ancillary revenues, 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 has 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?”.
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