Capital A, the parent company of AirAsia, has
upgraded its customer service with a much more advanced chatbot.
Since 2019, chatbot Ava has been handling
customers’ queries and complaints for AirAsia. She has now been
retired and her role has been taken up by ‘Ask Bo’ which has
enhanced artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)
capabilities.
During her time, Ava handled more than 113 million
customer queries, and at the peak of the COVID19 pandemic in 2020,
she handled over 43 million queries that year alone.
Ask Bo can speak English, Chinese, Bahasa (BM,
Indonesian), Thai, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese.
He has been designed to provide Live updates on
flight status such as delays and departures, as well as boarding
information. He will also send push notifications on any last
minute changes on the day of operations, and give baggage
information (tracking, arrival belt, mishandled baggage reports).
Travellers will also be able to use Ask Bo to
change flights, request refunds, choose service recovery options,
and by March talk live to a human agent during the Ask Bo
interaction.
“Our guests
have spoken, and we are listening and learning. We felt their
frustration towards our first AI chatbot – AVA which was always a
work in progress. We recognise she fell short of people’s
expectations and we want to do better,” said Tony Fernandes, CEO
of Capital A. “Given the size of the airline that AirAsia is, with thousands of
refunds and flight change requests, humans alone cannot cope, we
have to also use technology. We learned through AVA how to use
artificial intelligence to answer complex and sizable queries
better and faster. Over the last eight months, the customer
experience team have zeroed in on what our guests need and want,
what their top complaints are, and today we are happy to introduce
Ask Bo, named after our airline Group CEO, Bo Lingam. He has been
at my side for the past 21 years and is the go-to person with all
answers to our group’s airline questions.”
In a bid to be more open and transparent, Capital
A will also reveal live information on on-time performance, as well as
baggage handling information on its website and super app.
The company
has also vowed to continue to review guests’ feedback from various
perspectives across the group, support cross departmental
collaboration and adoption of customer experience programmes into
different business entities, while ensuring that leaders lend
their full support in the successful implementation of CX
enhancement initiatives.
Bo Lingam, Group CEO of AirAsia Aviation Group,
said, “I am happy to put my name and my face for this new and
enhanced version of our customer concierge service, that promises
to be more proactive and attentive. Lower fares doesn’t mean lower
service quality and it is very important to us that our guests
feel cared for when they choose to fly with us, for the best fares
and the best customer experience. The buck stops with me. Ask Bo
will make the customer journey easier, simpler and more
informative.”
:
Evolution of Airline Chatbots – Interview with Jonathan Newman,
CCO of ( caravelo (.
