On the Beach, founded in 1995, is one of the UK’s leading online travel agencies offering value for money summer holidays to the world’s most popular beach destinations. Customers can choose from 50 million available flight seats and more than 30,000 hotels around the world and take advantage of a selection of other travel products such as car hire, insurance and resort transfers. The Challenge: In 2010 On the Beach were planning the launch of a new website. As part of that project they wanted to find a way to reduce administration calls to their after sales department and, in return, minimise the call waiting times for clients to improve their overall customer experience. They determined that a Virtual Assistant from Creative Virtual would be the best way to position their business at the forefront of emerging technology and, most importantly, improve their customer service efficiency and effectiveness.
The Solution:
The Creative Virtual team began development of Ask Alison by working closely with On the Beach and call centre agents to identify the most frequent queries of callers. Using this list and additional information gathered from the website, a collection of initial FAQs, keywords and decision trees was produced.
The team then created three table answers to allow the Virtual Agent to refer to specific destinations and hotels based on a database lookup. Additionally, the system was conditioned to recognise when users enter questions in a foreign language.
On the Beach sought to have Alison be not only a practical tool to improve customer service, but also an enjoyable and engaging means for users to interact with their brand. Created in 3D, animated avatar Alison displays a variety of emotions in response to the user input. Her responses are conversational and she can assist customers with everything from the basics of booking to the vagaries of Ryanair’s online check-in process.
The V-Person™ has been integrated with a weather feed allowing Alison to provide users with current weather conditions for many holiday destinations. When users ask Alison about the weather where she is, she takes advantage of an up-selling opportunity and not only provides the current weather conditions in Manchester, where On the Beach is located, but then comments on the weather in Sharm el-Sheikh while opening that resort guide in the background.
The template has been designed to allow for dropdown menus to assist Alison in gathering information from the user. For example, if a user asks ‘What’s the baggage allowance?’ Alison presents a dropdown menu of airline options. She can then provide specific information to the user for the selected airline.
On the Beach also takes advantage of the fully customisable context sensitive customer service/ promotional message area on the interface. The clickable images in the bottom right corner of the template change to correspond with the user input. In addition, Ask Alison utilises the In Conversation Survey (ICS) which allows the user to provide feedback after each answer without leaving the V-Person conversation. This survey collects information such as the helpfulness of the given answer and saved calls to the contact centre. This feedback helps to refine Alison’s content and improve accuracy.
The Result:
Ask Alison was launched on 23 September 2010 as On the Beach’s new online assistant.
In June 2011 Alison had over 49,000 conversations and provided answers to over 98% of the 120,000 questions she was asked.
Since the launch of Ask Alison, incoming calls to On the Beach’s call centre have been reduced by 20-30% per week resulting in a dramatic decrease in call waiting times. This positive effect allows service agents to better assist clients who need to speak to a human with more complex reservation issues.
Future developments for Alison include providing multi-lingual responses to questions from On the Beach’s international clients, placement on the ‘Manage your Booking’ area with integration into customer reservations and positioning in the sales booking path to assist with destination decisions and requirement advice.
Jennifer Skehan, Feedback Advisor at On the Beach, said, “We implemented ‘Alison’ with the help of Creative Virtual to improve our customer booking experience. We have been tracking the progress made in this initial phase of the launch and have witnessed our customers having fun interacting with ‘Alison’ and in turn, having fun interacting with our website. ‘Alison’ compliments the other service channels available to our clients and adds a fun and cutting-edge dimension to our site.”
Asking Alison is the quickest and easiest way to find answers to your questions about booking a holiday with On the Beach.
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