S7 Airlines, a member of the global Oneworld aviation alliance, is introducing a new channel of communication with passengers – an online chat with call center employees. The new feature will be introduced on the airline’s website and in the mobile application S7. In the near future, processing of appeals will be partially transferred to artificial intelligence, whose expertise is formed on the basis of the technology of machine learning.
The processing of requests in the chat will be handled by a separate team of operators who are ready to advise passengers on any issues related to travel with S7 Airlines and help resolve disputes.
Artificial intelligence will begin to work with the processing of the most frequently asked questions, including those concerning the rules for carrying hand luggage. Over time, the chat-bot will take on more and more topics. At the heart of its work lies the technology of reinforcement learning. At the initial stage, he gets information from the ready-made knowledge base, and as he replenishes the chat, the history of operator dialogues and his own communication with passengers improves his answers. Employees of the new unit and chat-bot take on some of the load of the voice call center, which, on the whole, allows to increase the speed of handling passenger requests.
“We are trying to use the opportunities of modern technologies to improve the level of passenger service. The new solution is aimed at those who normally and comfortably communicate in online channels. The chat is built on the principle of omnichannel: the platform aggregates all the information about the passenger, including the history of interaction with S7 Airlines in social networks, by email, in the chat itself and activity on the site. Due to this, at the time of the call, the operator already has an understanding of how he can help the passenger and what has already been done”, explains the deputy general director for information technology at S7 Group, Pavel Voronin.
For example, if the platform records that the passenger has written to the chat from the ticket purchase page, the employee understands that his question may be related to the choice of additional services and is ready to give prompt advice on purchasing an additional baggage space, booking a luxury seat or tell about insurance conditions.
An important tool for the new platform is a comprehensive online directory for contact center employees, developed by S7 Airlines specialists. It assembles all the necessary databases and has an intelligent internal search, which allows the operator to receive any information in a single source.
