MyAustrian Messenger Service Proof of Concept
Innovation • Customer Service • Automation
About Austrian Airlines
Austrian Airlines is Austria’s biggest airline with a global route network of around 130 destinations and 360 flights per day. This success story talks about our collaboration and one of our first chatbot projects from 2016.
3
months from the idea stage to product launch
1500
daily messages
5
most important customer support questions included
The chatbot, called myAustrian Messenger Service, could help customers with flight searches and frequently asked questions such as luggage. It provided flight recommendations and flight status information.
Dr. Julian Fischer
Head of Product & Innovation
Austrian Airlines
How we made it happen
Challenge
Rapid innovation to relieve customer service
Austrian Airlines had a strong need to relieve customer service due to a high occurrence of customer service requests during peak times.
Since the bigger amount of requests was based on frequently asked questions, the solution of automation was a perfect fit for the internal customer service department as well as for customers, who were seeking quick information.
Approach
There were some major decisions needed to be made in conceptualizing the Chatbot. First there was the question of functionality. What is the scope of the bot? We quickly identified that a minimal viable bot (MVB) for an airline should:
- be able to search for flights
- answer the top 5 customer support questions excellently
- handle other questions reasonably well
- small talk on a basic level
- hand over the conversation to a human agent if the bot fails to answer questions
Furthermore, we had to decide who would speak. We opted for the choice in which the brand speaks for itself and the myAustrian Messenger Service was born. The decision was made to not use the word Bot in the name, because it was felt people where not yet accustomed with this term at that point.
The next question we needed to tackle was how the bot would speak. And that is were our partner ambuzzador came in. They provided the domain specific knowledge for Austrian Airlines, which included standard greetings like “Servus” or certain ways to communicate. This domain knowledge is always an important part of the personality of the bot. Because the personality is reflected in the tonality of the bot, which makes the experience something unique and hopefully outstanding.
After clarifying all of the above, it was time to get our hands dirty – it was time to build the bot.
After we realized that the Classical MVC (Model View Controller) structure of software projects didn’t make sense for this use case, we came up with a clever system to structure a big bot architecture: a Lifecycle Model. It had the 4 stages Enhance, Understand, Knowledge & Decide.
Result
From inspiration, selling ancillary services to delivering answers to questions along the whole travel journey, the myAustrian Messenger Service positioned Austrian Airlines AG as one of the early movers towards automated customer service through chatbots. Not only was the customer service’ response time reduced drastically with frequently asked questioned answered on the spot, but also first steps towards personalization were taken through system integration.
From idea stage to a product launch within 3 months, Austrian Airlines honored their perception of being the ‘Speedboat’ for the Lufthansa Group in regards to innovation projects.
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