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How AI chatbots are transforming the travel sector

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Just as the covid pandemic started waning, another crisis hit the travel industry—massive staffing shortages that have grounded thousands of flights in the last few weeks. Undoubtedly, this disruption too will come to an end. Still, there is a worrying pattern of the travel industry’s disruptions causing countless passengers a great deal of anxiety and loss of capital.

Even when the industry returns to normal, there is the issue of airlines and travel agencies having to spend millions to rehire, train, and deploy customer support agents, which can often be a death blow to companies struggling to survive after incessant lockdowns.

One of the best ways airlines and travel agents are coping with these issues is through travel chatbots powered by AI. Here, we explore whether they are worth the hype.

AI chatbot applications that are disrupting the travel sector

Seamless and cost-effective customer support 24X7

To provide the best possible support for your customers, you don’t have to hire an entire fleet of customer support agents who must work through the night to satisfy globetrotting travellers.

All you need is a powerful AI-based chatbot that can identify even vague queries using Natural Language Processing to produce perfectly satisfactory, preprogrammed responses to even vague queries, such as “flights to Dublin” and “roundtrip to Paris’”, etc.

Besides, most support requests can be automated; the chatbot can be programmed to respond quickly to frequently asked questions.

To ensure that customers don’t miss the human touch, advanced chatbots can be deployed to answer after performing sentiment analysis.

For instance, if the customer is frustrated, the bot can respond with a discount and an apology or offer a refund/cancellation option for the flight ticket or travel package.

It is also worth mentioning that an AI chatbot can help you utilize the human support agents better; they can focus on challenging tickets while the bot ensures that trivial issues or commonly asked questions don’t clutter the helpdesk.

Owing to all these benefits, travel chatbots are a great cost-cutting measure.

Personalized upselling

Amazingly, some chatbots can read the customer’s moods and analyze buying data to make personalized buying recommendations to help travel agencies and airlines generate extra revenue.

For example, just as the customer is about to checkout, the bot can send a message asking if they would like to upgrade their seat at a discounted price. Often, the passenger consents. Similarly, airlines can upsell ancillaries, such as travel insurance, specially wrapped luggage to minimize covid risk, free cancellations, etc.

Resourceful reservation agent

Airlines and travel agents can delight their customers with travel chatbots that can provide them with the best deals while booking by comparing thousands of hotels, flights, car rental, and food options.

This level of customization for the customer based on their budget and interest is not something that a human can match. Interestingly, using a travel chatbot, customers can book flights, tour packages, and other services from the channel of choice, whether it is social media, your app, or the website.

Apart from providing quick and personalized recommendations, travel companies can impress their customers by having the chatbot provide useful insights, such as the best day to visit the place or the top five destinations to visit.

Also, the travel chatbot can provide functions, such as notifying customers when the price for a flight ticket has dropped, via an SMS.

More importantly, the AI chatbot can assist the customer throughout the journey. This feature is quite useful given how customers can get frustrated if their ticket or enquiry gets passed on to another support agent when one person’s shift has ended. However, with a bot, the customer can easily claim discounts for lost luggage, get the best deals on local hotels, etc.

Unparalleled disruption management

Imagine if a flight is cancelled, and all the passengers take to social media at the same time to complain about your airline and get a particularly damaging hashtag trending. Having a handful of support agents doing damage control will lead to slower responses, which would add fuel to the fire.

To take control of the situation, travel chatbots powered by AI are the perfect solution. They can instantly send out thousands of messages across channels, addressing every customer by name before resolving their issues.

Moreover, the bots are tireless; they can work through the night and up until the crisis is resolved. If the chatbots are taking on all the straightforward requests, you can focus your support team’s energy on delighting the passengers by personally handling complicated requests.

As a result, the chatbots are, in a time of crisis, lifesavers that can help you deal simultaneously with countless angry passengers and provide them with seamless cancellations, refunds, or other issue resolutions.

Conclusion

As you can see, AI-powered chatbots for the travel industry are incredibly versatile and help with various applications, including customer support, trip planning, lead generation, and even upselling. Notably, it can handle customer requests throughout the year without a break and ensure that no customer leaves your website, app, or social media page frustrated that they didn’t get the necessary resolution.

Consequently, AI chatbots have emerged as a surefire way for travel companies to optimize revenue and enhance the customer experience. To know more about how such a solution can be implemented for your travel company, reach us for a demo or trial.

Omnichannel

Omnichannel customer relationship management – the future of customer management

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“Alexa, find me the best prices on flights to London.”

Gone are the days when customers reached airlines and travel agents through only phone, email, or the company website. Everyone’s house is filled to the brim with “smart devices” that can be used to make inquiries, book tickets, or even raise complaints. There are numerous instances of customers reaching out via WhatsApp, social media direct messages, and even the comments section of a promotional post on social media.

Customers seamlessly switch between devices, and they alternate frequently between various modes of search, so they expect you to be reachable no matter what channel they use. Further, they expect to be served in the medium in which they reached out to you. For instance, they’ll be upset if they reach you via Facebook Messenger, and you send them off to fill a Google Form or redirect to a website.

But most importantly, they expect personalization; customers wouldn’t appreciate any automated messages that say you will look into the matter or directs them to your website or gives them an email/phone to reach when they want a resolution through social media.

If you are eager to cater to modern passengers and provide them with a delightful experience, getting an omnichannel CRM is the way to go.

With an omnichannel CRM, you can handle customer interactions from all channels in a single platform, resulting in a seamless customer management process.

Why omnichannel CRM is the future

A specialized travel CRM can go a long way in bolstering your customer management efforts by helping you connect with clients across multiple channels, help them make bookings, get relevant travel information, and resolve any queries they may have.

Equipped with such a tool, you can:

Provide exceptional customer experience:

You can delight customers by rapidly responding no matter which platform they use to reach you. It is possible to configure the CRM to automatically assign agents to handle the customer or person inquiring or respond with a personalized canned message.

Owing to fast response times, and the ease with which customers can access the information they want, it is undeniable that you will get more bookings with minimal effort.

Capture customer data in a pain-free manner:

With a travel CRM that uses AI, you can rest assured that the tool will capture important customer details to build a profile for them that can be leveraged by you to offer personalized products. Also, you can use this contact information to reach the customer with relevant offers and information about travel.

Make the life of customer support agents easier:

Since requests from all platforms will be accessible in a single place, customer support agents don’t have to waste time searching for customer information. Since the CRM can also send personalized messages, the support agent can spend his time dealing with complex requests that can’t be automated.

Enable self-service and buying:

With the right CRM, you can improve your sales drastically by providing customers with the ability to serve themselves. You can do so by making use of canned responses and AI-powered chat and even knowledge bases filled with necessary information.

Automate time-consuming, tedious work

When it comes to serving customers, speed is key. Using a powerful CRM, you can deal with customer requests easily, as the tool will automatically assign the best possible agent. The software will further take care of preventing agent collision, which can be something that slows down work and serves to embarrass the company.

Conclusion

VoyagerAid travel agency CRM is equipped with all the necessary features to take the customer engagement efforts of airlines and travel agents to the next level and prepare you for the future when travel is set to pick up exponentially. With it, you can make sure that you leave no customers behind and upsell to the maximum extent possible via all your channels.

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Can Chatbots/Virtual Assistants Help Airlines Bounce Back When Travel Revives?

by with No Comment Blog

According to Forbes, 86% of consumers prefer humans to chatbots.

This should not be surprising, given how many of us have reached out to customer support, hoping to get to a sympathetic human, only to be faced with a chatbot that seems determined to annoy us with either nonsensical answers or the infamous message: Sorry, I cannot help you with that.

But what if we told you that chatbots will RESCUE your AIRLINE?

That it will turn the limp that COVID-19 has given your airline’s growth into an unstoppable sprint?

Sounds unbelievable?

Allow us to show you how ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE makes that possible. As you read, you will see how AI-powered customer service chatbots will not just save you money but also leave your customer delighted.

The situation to date

While chatbots with basic functionalities have been implemented by the airline sector, most of the customer support work is still being done by humans. To cut back on costs, airlines have taken to outsourcing their customer support needs, but there is a limit to the money that they can save.

Making matters worse, the COVID-19 outbreak has forced airlines to cut back on support staff. This has, to a large degree, left the airline sector vulnerable to surges in customer support requests as the pandemic subsides and travel resumes.

That raises a serious question.

How will airline support teams scale up when travel volume picks up?

Like many other sectors, the aviation industry has sought to leverage AI to enhance their passengers’ travel experience.

AI chatbots, which are self-training systems that can remember user preferences and the context of conversations to provide a human-like experience, can go a long way in enhancing customer satisfaction and bringing down costs.

Owing to its immense potential, airlines have been quick to tap into AI-powered virtual assistants/chatbots to both replace and facilitate the working of customer support executives. In many instances now, airline companies employ AI chatbots to provide customers with personalized care and flight information.

Key trends in airline chatbot implementation

Increasingly, airlines have implemented their chatbots on popular social media apps, allowing customers to get their issues resolved at their convenience. Here are a few stats that prove that the airline chatbot revolution is here to stay.

  • Iceland-based carrier, Icelandair, now provides 24×7 customer support via Facebook Messenger thanks to its bot.
  • Air Asia’s implementation of AVA ensures that 10 times the normal number of tickets are cleared daily.
  • WestJet’s Juliet resolved 87% of the cases coming from Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp owing to its machine learning capabilities.
  • During the peak of the pandemic, Iberia’s IBot resolved 72% of the incoming queries. Further, on other platforms, it had a success rate of 88% while dealing with 250,000 messages. Notably, the issues it dealt with included booking management, voucher requests, and flight status inquiries.
  • The rebooking bots from KLM saved agents’ time by resolving 10% of the issues instantly and automatically and only diverting complex requests to their human counterparts.

It is beyond reasonable doubt that airline chatbots are here to stay. If the examples are not convincing, maybe the SITA report, which found 68 percent of airlines and 42% of all airports use chatbots/ virtual assistants to keep customers notified of important developments, will do the job.

Why the newfound popularity?

Given how unpopular ordinary chatbots are, it may be surprising to see AI-based bots taking over the industry. But what you are missing is that AI chatbots have a variety of features that give them an edge over all the other means of customer support that airlines have been using since the industry’s inception.

These features are what will help the industry bounce back when travel volumes go up.

  • Stay on top of customer support requests regardless of volume

With AI, airlines have the option of resolving tickets extremely quickly with a limited budget even as support request volumes go through the roof. AI is tireless, so chatbots employing the technology have what it takes to scale up rapidly to meet demand. This is especially beneficial because airlines do not have to go through the tedious process of hiring and training lots of customer support executives in a short duration when travel volumes go up.

Even the ones that you do end up hiring will be more productive given how they do not have to deal with repetitive tasks all day thanks to AI-enabled automation of ticket resolution. This is a surefire way to save a ton of money.

Besides, these highly intelligent virtual agents can be used to provide quick resolutions across multiple channels, which will save you and the customers a lot of time.

  • Identify and solve trending issues during flight disruptions

Even after we put the COVID-19 crisis slowly behind us, it will take time before we know its full ramifications. Consequently, new issues in travel will keep cropping up, just like the necessity for social distancing that came up amidst the worst period of the pandemic.

New challenges that may come up in the wake of the pandemic, such as government regulations or related disruptions in flight services can be found out quickly and tackled using AI. Promptly informing passengers of issues when there is a disruption in flights is a great way to prevent tickets from coming in.

  • Revenue optimization through the sale of ancillaries

The fact that AI chatbots can automatically sell ancillaries through a passenger’s journey is a point in its favor. Ancillaries are a key driver of airline revenue, so the ability of chatbots to offer personalized ancillaries, such as priority boarding, seat upgrades, and extra checked baggage, answer queries instantaneously, and facilitate easier purchases justifies their use as travel picks up.

  • Retain more customers with stellar customer support

Steadily, travel volumes are going up, and you can capitalize on this by consistently providing customers with a delightful travel experience. According to a study from Applied Marketing Science and Twitter, customers are willing to pay more for a flight if they have had a positive experience with the airline’s customer support team.

With an airline chatbot, you can make sure that your customers are taken care of round the clock and attended to instantly. Amazingly, you can do this without hundreds of support staff stationed around the globe.

  • Safeguard your customer service executives’ mental well-being

Since a lot of customer service executives were laid off during the pandemic, the task of handling countless frustrated passengers fell on the few agents who were left. This has taken a huge toll on their mental health.

As the COVID situation gets better, support requests are set to increase drastically. With the use of AI chatbots, airlines can reduce the workload of agents by using a virtual assistant to take care of the commonly asked questions.

Conclusion

Chatbots will become ubiquitous in the aviation industry in the coming years, given the lessons from COVID-19. Further, they are much more than a cost-saving measure; airline chatbots have the potential to boost ancillary sales and bring down support costs, blurring the line between customer experience, sales, and customer support.

With chatbots/virtual assistants, airlines will also be able to retain more customers by allowing them to access instant, personalized, and easy self-service. All airline chatbots are not created equal, though. To maximize customer satisfaction and ROI, Infiniti Software Solution’s airline chatbot is the optimal solution.