Technology Update

Today’s Technology Update is brought to you by Excite Holidays.

AI bots: More than just frontline customer service

There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about the use of AI and chatbots, primarily as a customer service solution. A slew of companies, including many in the travel industry, are moving towards at least part of their customer service coming in the form of chatbots. While technologies like these are still in their infancy the risk is always that you save time and money at the real cost of happy customers. A poor customer service experience can be very costly for any business. We still believe in the importance of a real person picking up the phone or on live chat when we get a query from one of our agents.

AI isn’t going anywhere, and we believe a great opportunity to utilise this technology is actually in the back end, streamlining quality control processes that ultimately benefit agents without the risk of a poor user experience. Reconfirmations has been a behind-the-scenes service we offer our agents, whereby we confirm the details of a booking with our partner before the travel dates. This allows us to get ahead of any potential issues with a booking that might result in a dissatisfied client for our agents. It has traditionally been a very manual process, with people picking up the phone and making hundreds of calls. Supplementing this checking process with our partners by using AI technology will allow us to quickly verify a large number of bookings and better predict any issues before they happen. The result is a happy client, and an agent that’s more likely to win repeat business from them.

Nicholas Stavropoulos - Executive Director, Excite Holidays