Industry Voice: How AI and data sharing can enhance the customer experience
Tomasz Pawliszyn, CEO of AirHelp, talks to ITIJ about new technology and helping customer claims
The distress caused by lost luggage and delayed or cancelled flights can make or break a travel experience for passengers. Whether it sets the tone for the upcoming stay or brings the trip to a close, holidaymakers’ first and last travel experiences are crucial in defining their satisfaction with their trip.
With 121 million passengers recorded to have travelled from UK airports in 2023, over a third (41 million) experienced flight disruptions. Of these, 921,000 passengers were delayed for over three hours and 3.4 million people were entitled to compensation. A recent study by AirHelp revealed that when asked to rate their satisfaction with the care they received when disrupted, passengers scored airlines just 3.13 out of 10.
Air travel has a lot to learn when it comes to customer experience, but the outlook is no better for passenger luggage. Worldwide, passenger numbers were up 50.2% to 3.4 billion in 2022, according to air transport IT company SITA, but mishandled baggage saw a staggering 74.7% increase compared with 2021. Delayed luggage accounts for 80% of mishandled baggage, with damaged luggage at 13% and lost or stolen bags making up the remaining 7%. While passengers are often reunited with their belongings, that doesn’t make up for the stress it causes them, with the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) reporting that 44% of UK passengers were dissatisfied with the resolution to the luggage loss or damage they received.
The role of insurers
For insurers, that makes for bleak reading. With passenger numbers now approaching pre-pandemic levels, it’s clear that the industry infrastructure is struggling to cope. And while the industry itself needs to shape up, poor customer experience has the potential to limit future travel or deter it completely. This is something that needs to be avoided at all costs as the travel industry continues to bounce back from the global pandemic.
Ultimately, the job of dealing with much of the fallout goes to insurers, but with passenger numbers increasing along with delays and lost luggage, the logistical stresses being experienced by the air travel industry are being passed on to insurance companies.
As insurers deal with more claims, the natural response is to ensure more staff are handling phones, email, and webchat to process claims and provide vital information to disrupted passengers. That, in turn, places additional pressure on companies to train new staff quickly, which has a knock-on effect on their wider business operations.
Streamlining operations
This is where technology comes into play, in the form of improved internal comms. Internal knowledge-based chatbots are invaluable tools when new staff need to be brought up to speed quickly. We are all familiar with external, customerfacing chatbots, but the idea of using a chatbot for internal operations is a path less travelled. Providing a one-stop shop for training and HR solutions, knowledge-based chatbots can offer valuable internal training resources directly to new recruits, meaning other members of the team can focus on the day-to-day and new staff can get up to speed and, crucially, become more effective quickly.
With passenger numbers now approaching pre-pandemic
levels, it’s clear that the industry infrastructure is struggling to cope
Of course, scaling up operations to deal with increased demand doesn’t have to mean upping staffing levels. Technology can provide efficiencies in several other areas to improve customer experience and simplify the job of dealing with claims and enquiries.
Artificial intelligence (AI) voicebots, in particular, are adept at dealing with customer queries, providing an effective call-deflection solution for busy call centres. Agents can focus on delivering quality customer care for those with complex issues, while the voicebot can triage incoming calls and direct them to agents only where necessary. Best of all, AI voicebots trained on large language models can begin to identify repetitive issues and give busy customer service teams a clearer view of the demand for specific information.
Scripted chatbots can also deliver customer service on a grand scale with no limits to how many queries they can screen at a time. They do, however, require monitoring to ensure they are providing the right solutions for customers and are updated as new issues are uncovered. AI chatbots, on the other hand, while more expensive to implement, provide a more ‘hands-off’ solution, learning as they interact and able to crawl company sites and the wider web to find accurate information to relay to customers. While not entirely autonomous, they require less day-to-day maintenance to deliver a powerful customer service solution.
Looking to the future
Taking this one step further, predictive AI can provide analysis solutions that allow insurers to identify trends and react in real time to reassess claims and ensure accurate underwriting. Equally, the evolution of connected internet of things (IoT) devices will bring with them much-needed data. As these data ecosystems become standardised, data will be shared across industries. But this huge volume of data is only useful if it can be interpreted. Predictive AI can rapidly deduce patterns and trends from vast collections of data. That, in turn, will help the insurance industry keep pace with the ever-changing demands of the modern air traveller.
Internal knowledge-based chatbots are invaluable tools when
new staff need to be brought up to speed quickly
Additionally, access to behavioural data will make it easier to assess premiums and manage risk. With real-time behavioural data, insurance can be assessed in real time, allowing a raft of products that balance risk with customer benefits, creating a system that’s fair and equitable for both insurers and customers.
If insurers can deduce when passengers are travelling, the need for trip insurance is diminished. Consumers can take advantage of ‘always-on’ travel products with premiums assessed on a trip-by-trip basis, allowing for bespoke products that ensure their insurance product is right for them.
Technology provides answers to many of the issues faced by the travel industry. With customer experience under the microscope and no shortage of disgruntled travellers, the industry must take advantage of the myriad customer experience tools already at its disposal and keep an eye firmly on the future of data.