NB: This is a guest article by Dr Charles Wooters, chief scientist of Next IT.
Feels a little creepy – doesn’t it? But, this is the future of air travel (and how we will interact with technology in general).
Airlines will know customer preferences, what “home” means for a traveler, if he likes aisle seats on morning flights, and – most importantly for use on third-party aggregators – what his preferred airline is.
The kicker: these conversations won’t be happening with live representatives drawing from a knowledge base. Passengers will instead converse with avatars, equipped with artificial intelligence and natural language understanding.
Recent news of life-sized holograms at three major New York airports has many passengers considering artificial intelligence and the technology’s real implications on their travel experience.
Minds go to fanciful extremes like the Terminator or Minority Report and they wonder: “What do these things do?” or “What’s coming next?”
Well to begin, the NY installations won’t be having true conversations with anyone.
And they also aren’t the first of their kind in the travel industry: Manchester Airport became the first to use holograms back in 2011 for security preparation.
United (via Alex) and Alaska Airlines (via Jenn) use enhanced conversational avatars online, to interact with customers, answer questions, and assist with the booking process.
Conversational avatars are already engaging with customers everyday and present the path towards (counter intuitively enough) personalized service.
The massive amounts of data that can be gleaned and analyzed from logged conversations give a true window into what customers really want.
Rather than operating within the confines of links and search terms – customers can simply ask for what they’re looking for. With that, airlines begin to measure customer desire and store preferences.
Transforming customer information into personalized service is a key factor in the future of customer loyalty.
Why do it?
Currently, passengers view flight as a commodity, where price and schedule are more important than brand. But beyond this hunt for the lowest fare, customers are searching for personalized service.
They want their individual needs to be recognized and will support a brand that demonstrates that it understands their expectations, needs, quirks, and specific requests.
At the same time, sensitivities around privacy and storing personal information, such as what “home” means, makes the integration a balancing act.
In order for artificial intelligence to be truly effective in building customer loyalty in the future, airlines must be sure that transparency is built in around the technology.
Building a strong customer relationship is contingent on the amount of passenger information an airline can store, understand, and act upon – but passengers want to know what information is being stored and have control over how their preferences are determined.
There is no other way to deliver this transparency other than showing a customer the process behind an avatar’s decision making process.
This is key to successful integration – rather than take control away from passengers, make the planning and booking process more transparent by engaging in conversation and revealing how actions are taken on the passenger’s behalf.
This is part of the foundation to making artificial intelligence effective; it’s not just about the technology driving it, success relies on the trust that customer’s must develop on their own.
The Manchester and NY holograms barely scratch the surface of the use of artificial intelligence in the travel industry.
The real benefits come when the conversations between customer and technology begin.
Airlines that interact and build relationships with passengers through customer experience technology will lead the brightest future in winning customer loyalty and the lifetime revenue that comes with it.
NB: This is a guest article by Dr Charles Wooters, chief scientist of Next IT.
NB2: Virtual assistant image via Shutterstock.
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I wonder if and when artificial intelligence technology will be smart enough to provide real value to customers. If introduced too early, it may have the opposite effect and ruin it’s chances of making it to the mainstream.
I 100% agree that real personalisation will be the game changer for the travel companies.
I hope my avatar will look better than those in the movie!
Artificial intelligence is a subjective term in this case. Given the limited area of expertise required of such an avatar, the intellectual capital exists today to build such a system. The real question is can it be productized in a fashion that enables a positive return on investment. It doesn’t have to be HAL or the Enterprise Main Computer. It needs to be more of an “expert in a box”, which can be built.
It’s bound to happen. One possibility could well be Apple, when Siri meets iTravel.
“The real benefits come when the conversations between customer and technology begin.” I couldn’t agree more. I recently authored a blog post titled ‘What Makes a Great Virtual Assistant?’ which talks about how all Virtual Assistants are not created equal. There are differentiating factors that contribute to a successful experience with a VA from a mediocre one. If you are interested in reading more, you can find my post at http://blog.nextit.com/iva-technology/what-makes-a-great-virtual-assistant/
I am IT and gadgets guy, so I would love the technology to be more implemented in traveling.
Dr. Wooters — I followed your link to Next IT and was fascinated by the United app you have going. Can you talk about:
1. What’s “under the covers” so far as the app is concerned? At a high level, how does it work?
2. What success you and United have had with the app, and how you define “success” (are there metrics, for example, on ‘enhanced customer relations’?)
thanks much,
Rob
Hi Rob,
Sorry for the delayed response and thanks for checking out Next IT. As far as ‘under the covers’, Next IT’s platform leverages a hybrid model for NLP, using a combination of symbolic and statistical models, depending on the type of interaction. Symbolic models serve as the platform foundation, addressing high-value interactions, while statistical models are layered in to handle the bulk of the heavy computational work. The result is quality and precision of the human-centered symbolic methodology and the scalability and power of the statistical approach.
We design our Intelligent Virtual Assistants to help customers and users get things done. While I can’t share specific metrics with you, Ask Alex at United is exceeding customer expectations every month and United continues to leverage her in additional customer support channels to increase customer awareness and usage. For example, she’s shown on every domestic Gate Information Display in airports as well as mentioned as a time-saving resource to customers who are waiting on hold while calling United.
Take care,
Chuck
Sometimes technology is not always in the best interest of everyone. In this case, I can see thousands of employees being put out of jobs, travelers with special needs will not get helped properly, and travelers will become frustrated if they can’t get the results they seek. On a positive note, this may prove the value of a travel agent.
Why would this be any different than the frustrating, endless cycle of telephone menus and robots ?
Besides, passengers love to “bash” airline employees, argue, fight with them. How is this going to be done with a virtual robot? When irregular operations occur (especially at NY airports), no robot in the world can take the place of a human. Dream on.
Great thoughts, Charles!
I’ve been preaching for years about the need for “intelligent” customer information.
The depth and accuracy of the available customer intelligence will make a difference between a predictive and an adaptive service.
The first will know what the customer wants and allow for a fast and satisfactory delivery, while the currently used adaptive one will need to understand the customer needs at almost every interaction.
At this point, I don’t think that a 3D avatar would prove any more effective and beneficial than a traditional phone agent with advanced intelligence resources.
In fact, the few times I had to deal with a bot, I ended up in frustration and waste of time.
The inability to handle special cases is too much of a barrier for today’s bots.
Reminds me Phocus-Wright research of online travel trends in 2011 – using personal assistants with artificial intellegence was one of them. By the way, they mentioned Alaska Airlines case there.
Of course, there should be technology for a human taking control of traveller assistance in some situations when AI can’t help.
And of course, people saying that AI can’t substitute humans and complaining about people losing their jobs look like kind of neo-luddites for me.