Perfecting the Airport Experience with Conversational AI

Remember those quarantine days when we were bored to death and wondered when we would be able to go on vacation again? And when we heard there’d be no travel limit anymore, we rushed to buy tickets to get revenge for those days we couldn’t travel.

It wasn’t just us who missed the good old days. The airline industry suffered COVID trauma, with over $200 billion lost, erasing nine years of earnings. Airports, as an essential part of the airline industry, weren’t any different. In 2021 alone, airports lost $83.1 billion globally.

 

From Trauma to Recovery: A brighter future

Now that vaccinations are working, travel restrictions have been lifted, and normalization efforts are ongoing, airports are moving away from turbulent times. Travel cravings and the rise of domestic and international flights boost optimism and move the industry forward.

People are ready to travel like it’s summer 2019, but what they expect from an airport experience has changed a lot. Since the pandemic hit, health has been among travelers’ top concerns. As a result, more are looking for touchless interactions to reduce or eliminate contact with staff.

In other words, they want self-service solutions where they can solve their issues without the need for live assistance.

 

Keeping up with Changing Customer Needs

Although people now try to avoid personal interactions as much as possible, their need to get information and guidance remains. Conversely, they need more empathy and care since they’re more likely to suffer post-covid travel anxiety.

So, offering solutions that enable seamless customer engagement through touchless experience is among the top challenges most airports face today. Fortunately, they have automation to ask for help. With conversational AI, airports can offer touchless customer service across multiple channels like IVR, web, and mobile. These technologies can provide 24/7 automated customer service without needing customer service employees.

 

The power of automation: Conversational AI

But what is conversational AI anyway, and how does it help businesses?

Conversational AI lets customers naturally interact with systems in their own words. This technology uses natural language processing to make human-machine interaction easy in both written and verbal forms. With Conversational AI, businesses can offer enhanced self-service solutions for their customers.

Sestek Conversational AI solutions cover voice IVRs, chatbots, and virtual assistants. These solutions have been used successfully in different self-service automation projects in various industries. One of these successful projects is Istanbul Grand Airport (IGA), which uses Virtual Assistant to automate customer engagement.

 

Enhancing travel experience with Virtual Assistant: Istanbul Grand Airport (IGA) Case

With a 90-million passenger capacity, IGA is Turkey’s top global transfer hub. The airport needed an automation solution to handle increasing customer requests across multiple channels.

Using Sestek Virtual Assistant, IGA automated customer service and responded to customer inquiries 24/7, without the need for live agents, through its mobile app, WhatsApp, and IVR channels.

As well as providing customers with on-time and touchless engagement across multiple channels, the project also delivered many business advantages with visible effects on customer experience, time savings, and efficiency. With this technology, IGA;

• answered more than 275.000 visitor questions,
• saved 1.000 hours of agent time each month,
• and observed an 18% improvement in NPS for the WhatsApp channel.

To learn more about this case study, click here

 

Transform your customer service with Conversational AI

Are you looking for ways to offer your customers a smooth experience across multiple channels while staying on budget? Does boosting customer service while cutting costs and improving efficiency sound like what you need? Then Conversational AI is the answer.