The State of Customer Service in Travel & Hospitality (T&H) Industry

With the emergence of new tourist destinations, luxury resorts and business travels post Covid, the travel industry is witnessing a surge. Furthermore, the enhanced adoption of social media for posting travel tales and grievances has made customer experience a key focus area for the industry. Today, customers desire a quick resolution to their queries but the traditional contact center approach to query resolution is resource intensive and can result in delays in responding to customer queries, thereby leading to customer dissatisfaction and churn.

As important as it is to keep the customer satisfied, it is crucial to understand the operational burden of quick resolution to queries. Thus, a shift towards digitization and automation is vital for businesses to keep up with the increasing customer demands. Owing to the same, we have started to see businesses across the travel and hospitality (T&H) industry adopting virtual agents as a first line of gatekeepers to address queries and handover to an agent for complex queries. However, a digital shift comes with its own set of challenges. Most of the virtual agents are flow based bots and follow a predefined conversational flow. Secondly, the flow based bots lack personalization as they work on a fixed set of rules and do not perform tasks outside of their defined rules, which, at times, can be a cause of customer frustration.

How can Quantiphi help enhance CX

To provide customers with meaningful experience and mitigate the challenges brought forth by predefined conversational flow bots, it is important to have an AI based virtual agent to address customer grievances accurately. AI based Virtual Agents find their application in the T&H industry to support customers in quick query resolution around travel and booking status, assistance with cancellation/ rescheduling, and addressing any complaints to name a few.

By leveraging AWS, Quantiphi can help T&H industry transform their Customer Experience three-fold with its Amazon Lex powered highly-engaging Virtual Agent. The AI based virtual agent can be modified to meet specific customer requirements but based on the conversations with multiple customers, we have realized the need for the following features in a virtual agent:

Natural Language Processing to understand and respond to a variety of customer utterances
Context based navigation to comprehend user requirement from knowledge base and redirect the query to live agent, if required, rather than publishing a templatized message
Multi-turn conversations to collect user data and perform tasks such as bookings, rescheduling / cancellations and many more
Personalized recommendations for customers on discount packages and offers
Multilingual support to address queries for your customers across the globe
Omnichannel support and proactive notifications via emails, SMS, web and mobile applications
Third-party integration with Payment Gateways, Telephony Systems, Applications and Databases

Quantphi’s Ready to Deploy Offering

Over the years, we have realized the impediments faced by the industry to quickly deploy a virtual agent and starting to see value. Thus to expedite this journey, we have developed this QuickStart Offering which combines a chatbot with intelligent search to address customer queries.

In the larger scheme of things, providing customers with meaningful experience is no longer an optional requirement and thus, Quantiphi can help build and deliver solutions that will engage customers across the journey from onboarding to retention to increase LTV.

Reach out to us to know more about Quantiphi’s solutions and get started.