Adaptive Automation: Seamlessly Blending Agents and Bots to Deliver Exemplary CX

Aer Lingus’ Digital Journey

For airlines, passenger relationships are the most valuable ticket to long-term success. Aer Lingus recognise that 1:1 interactions with their digitally-savvy fliers creates a great CX – the foundation for satisfaction, loyalty and ultimately, customer retention. With digital channels transforming how travellers engage with Aer Lingus, the airline understood that to reach the heady heights of success, scalable and enterprise-grade care was needed.

Partnering with Conversocial, A Verint Company, in September 2013, Aer Lingus set the goal to go the extra mile with their customer service operation by efficiently managing and responding to their ever-increasing digital volumes. Delivering a first-class service with the help of a Conversational CX Platform would ensure that Aer Lingus could provide a seamless customer experience to their digital passengers.

With a long-term vision aligned with quality, choice and convenience, Aer Lingus have continuously innovated and adopted new features and functions, such as private messaging channels and more recently, automation, to propel their customer service strategy into the digital world.

Alongside messaging, innovative brands like Aer Lingus, are now figuring out how to use bots to add real value to the overall customer experience and help scale their digital care operation. Previously in the CX domain, it was much harder to automate full conversations there are just too many variables for what a customer could ask. But messaging channels are different. Humans and automation can sit side-by-side in a way that has not been possible before.

Done right, the messaging advantage for bot-automated interactions has clear and positive business impacts. Helping brands:

• Deliver better customer experiences: Automation of common enquiries results in quicker response times and faster time to resolution for customers, decreasing effort and increasing customer loyalty.
• Scale digital volumes: Service bots help brands manage high volume, low effort queries. Used as a frontline triage, bots should resolve repetitive, simple issues while highly skilled agents are dedicated to high-value interactions—creating big savings in customer service costs.
• Lower their cost-to-serve: Bot-ready platforms that combine both adaptive automation and agent-assisted service results in fewer enquiries needing a human response. Meaning highly skilled agents are free to handle more complex customer service enquiries
• Enable increased revenue: With the addition of payments, full commerce is now possible within messaging channels. When combined with the ability to send consumers targeted notifications and content with much higher open rates than email (as long as they opt-in). This is a huge untapped revenue source.

The partnership between messaging and automation is, however, often hard to get right.

Success requires an approach that combines the unique nature of messaging with human agents and adaptive automation to create scalable Conversational Customer Experiences. This combines the best aspects of messaging automation and human interaction to make connecting with a business as easy as messaging a friend.

Working seamlessly together, bots and human agents can turn CX into a competitive differentiator. This balance is exactly what Aer Lingus have achieved with their tier-1 service bot on Messenger.

The Result

1. ADAPTIVE AUTOMATION

Aer Lingus’ tier-1 service bot is designed to handle simple flight status requests over Messenger, sourcing this information in a single, smart interaction. Delivering flight status information via the same API as aerlingus.com and mobile app means Aer Lingus’ digital architecture is smartly aligned for a more consistent experience. Dynamic conversational experiences driven by Random Access Navigation (RAN), proprietary technology to Conversocial, A Verint Company, gives customers the ability to navigate through intent and interaction history without a predefined path.

2. BLENDING HUMANS AND AUTOMATION

Working seamlessly together, the Messenger bot and human agents are empowered to turn Aer Lingus’ customer service into a competitive differentiator. Aer Lingus can provide a scalable CX, to all their customers on Messenger, striking the right balance between adaptive automation and human support. For complex issues or instances where the bot is unable to collect all of the correct data, it can smoothly handover any conversation to human agents for resolution. Adding value to Aer Lingus’ digital strategy, the bot frees up agents to efficiently manage priority interactions or those which need an empathetic human touch.

3. PURPOSE BUILT FOR MESSAGING

The tier-1 service bot has helped Aer Lingus transform Messenger into a channel best-positioned to deliver conversational customer experiences. Digital interactions with Aer Lingus now have the same flexibility of real-world conversation, with the ability to switch topics and, in some cases, context. Based within Messenger, the bot facilitates single, continuous conversation with customers via private messaging. For Aer Lingus, this has revolutionized their engagement strategy by capitalising on digital CX through Messenger.