Here is the link to the original article with the waybackmachine: Due to covid and flow.ai beeing taken over by khoros this blog is no longer publicly available. This blog was written in q3 of 2019.
Sadly we have chosen to retire Joy due to the lack of results in early 2022 and Covid hitting us hard. The customer engagement was to low to keep it alive sadly.
Artificial intelligence (AI) to keep in touch, in a personal way, outside opening hours. That is what 333travel uses their chatbot they called Joy for.
The travel industry is an innovative market. The competition is prevalent and the urge for technological advantage is great but also difficult. If you do not operate technically independently in this market, there is a good chance that you will be absorbed by the crowd too much and can therefore no longer be unique in your proposition and your right to exist will be endangered.
We are constantly looking to improve our position on the market and every day we translate IT into the business in the right way so that IT actually works for us. Keep experimenting and keep on trying new things!
Our challenge
We are always looking for ways to better serve our customers and we want to do this in a personal way. This way we can really build a relationship with our customers and offer fully customized solutions.
We are convinced that when you travel with us you will get the best possible experience of enjoyment because at 333travel we think along with you from A to Z and completely unburden you.
...With the help of Joy the customer has their answer faster and we can offer more quality because Joy indirectly ensures less work and more available information before a personal contact moment takes place...
The use of artificial intelligence may therefore sound contradictory, but that is certainly not the case. We will of course start to use this AI to provide our customers with the existing information / FAQ on our website if they have any questions about it.
But in addition to providing information, we will always try to direct to personal contact. It is important for us to physically come into contact with our potential customers, in a more personal, easy and accessible way.
Our goal
The automated collection of leads in a way that is as personal as possible is therefore our case for the implementation of this artificial intelligence. The rest is a added bonus. We strive for even more for personal contact through this AI. The focus is creating value and optimizing our customer journey outside of our regular working hours.
Our solution
Together with Flow.ai, we have started testing to see what personal ways we could use to get a customer to get in touch with us.
A correct use case of AI is very important here, but also the way in which you can train this AI. We wanted to create the most natural way of interaction, but we have to work with non sexy data such as “departure” and “arrival” dates to get an idea beforehand of when someone wants to leave for his holiday, this is a greater challenge than it seems.
We absolutely wanted to avoid that our AI does not immediately understand it when someone says “I want to visit Thailand on June 17 for 1 week”.
A natural interaction with the right intent
We have therefore trained our LMM that it understands intents with knowledge of what the departure date is and when you want to leave. It is therefore not an absolute fact what we want from you, but it is a value that falls within the meaning of “when do you want to leave”. There are so many different but also correct answers to this question and if you take our requirements into account, this bot must also understand everything below and more:
- In the summer i want for the holidays…
- During the winter i would like to stay …
- In autumn I want to go to…
- I want to be in Thailand for Christmas…
- We want to go to … next year
It immediately becomes unfriendly if after this question there is still a date field to be filled with when do you want to leave. Or even worse, the bot dont understands the question at all. a customer also often does not know when he wants to leave exactly. When he starts like this, is he obliged to fill in this information? You have one try with this type of customer.
Customers are fed up enough already with non working chatbots from large companies trying to reduce FTE and see how far they can go to annoy their customers.
We instantly record the key information of the expected departure period automatically. After all, this will be deepened further in the contact moment, for now our specialists will know what the intent is and can act accordingly.
It is also possible within our implementation to capture all the variables we need with only one sentence from a customer. We only need the contact details after this and we give a call on the requested time and date.
Collecting data
“Good afternoon, I am looking for a holiday starting in Indonesia and ending in Bali for 2 adults and 2 children with a hotel on the beach leaving July 21 and coming home the 3th of August .”
The above sentence is a practical example of what Joy understands. We record these values and we immediately know that there is enough data. We only ask for the customer’s telephone number/e-mail address and call him at a preferred time specified by himself.
we call you at the preferred moment, we consciously chose not to let the customer choose something through a date picker to keep the natural flow. For the customer it is easier to say: “next Thursday at 10 am”. From this, we understand what the intent is and call that particular customer at that exact time. There are also plenty of customers who say they want to be called right now. Regardless of whether they can be called at that moment or not, they drop out as soon as they get a date picker presented. Especially when the present day is missing.
Because the customer visits our website, we also know from which page we have received his request for personal contact. This way we have even more information for our specialists to get an idea of what the intent is.
This data gets send automatically as a lead/proposal in our backoffice called BOSS. And every follow up on this lead is recorded there.
Result: Joy sees the light.
After a large number of internal tests, various tweak adjustments and using various methods to achieve our goal, Joy was born. We have also given her a personal face because of our intention to keep the conversations personal. Of course, we do indicate that Joy is a “Virtual Travel Assistant”. Our real colleagues are still the travel specialists.
...What is particularly noticeable from the results is that the interactions and requests that come in via Joy are usually from people between 20 - 35 years old...
Important lessons
The most important lesson in this might be a bit of an open door, but make sure your goal is set on paper, and start with the simplest implementation of this goal and slowly develop it into a more complex working final product.
We first started to look at ways in which we can collect our required data with Flow.ai and really understand how this works. Then we tested a lot of different scenario's and slowly worked towards one complete flow that combined the best of multiple flows together. We immediately gained a lot of experience with the various options that flow provided this way.
We are well supported in this by Flow.ai, but due to our own in-house knowledge, we didn’t require the support all the time and could really dive deep on the subject.
The flow.ai system is well structured, very logical and understandable. This shouldn’t block you from experimenting.
The future
The first Quarter is our busiest period. Because we implemented Joy relatively shortly before this period, we have not yet activated the option to Live Chat. This is something that is going to be activated after this quarter.
In addition, we want to go even further in the near future with Joy and make her THE assistant of our customer portal that will help you on your way after you made a booking. If Joy does not know the answer, you will immediately get in touch with the specialist you booked the trip at. If you have any questions during your trip? Ask Joy. Do you have problems during your trip? Joy ensures that you get the answer as soon as possible and that you get into direct contact with us when needed.
We see Joy as our “Virtual Travel Assistant” where the very specific knowledge of our destinations and our knowledge of customization remains with our travel specialists because this is the strength of our personal contact in which we personally make the difference, within our philosophy.
