Airlines and hotels: customer service from social networks to "in app" chat

Social networks have been a preferred customer service channel for brands for years and the travel industry is no exception. But we see more and more players reinternalizing this channel to go through bots integrated to their site and, especially, to their app.

We have a short memory but the adoption of social networks by brands has not been a long quiet river. At the beginning, social networks were a communication, promotion and marketing tool and in no case a servicing tool.

They “belonged” to communication, used to a unidirectional top-down speech, and there was no question of lending this “toy” to the customer service that needed conversations to help. A conversation is neither scripted nor mastered and moreover it allows everyone to see that mistakes are made! No way.

Ironic considering that if there was one department that needed such a tool, it was servicing To be where the customer is, to benefit from a scale effect by helping in public (an answer is visible to all those who have the same problem) and, finally, assuming that “zero problems” do not exist, to reinforce one’s brand by showing everyone that one is helping customers who have a problem by doing so in public.

I’m talking about a time that the less than 20 years old can’t know but before becoming an example in this matter (even if it has gone down since) but there was a period of “snowy episodes” and erupting volcanoes where, while KLM decided to innovate in front of the emergency by using its twitter account to help customers, Air France strictly forbade this practice to people in charge of its social media.

Times have changed quickly and Air France has become a model even if by industrializing the practice has perhaps lost quality over time. The mass of resources has replaced their competence.

All this to say that what seems obvious to us today was not always obvious. A large number of airlines are still failing on the servicing channels outside the hotline and contact form. I am thinking in particular of the Gulf airlines and many Asian airlines. This shows that one can be premium in delivery and zero when it comes to dealing with an irregularity in operations. This is mainly due, in my opinion, to the fact that culturally these businesses find it difficult to admit in public that they may be doing something wrong, so problems are only dealt with in private. Example, even if the case is a little different: the recent “Garuda Gate” where the Indonesian airline, following a “bad buzz” due to a video posted online by a “vlogger” has forbidden passengers to “document their flights” under penalty of being punished and disembarked … before reversing under public pressure.

But a strong trend has existed for a few years: entrusting customer service to robots. Well, partly.

For the past 2 or 3 years, we have been seeing the emergence of “chat bots” or “conversational robots” which specialists assure us are the future of customer relationships. Some are pure assistants, others manage services ranging from reservations to support.

The advantage of the robot? It is simply scalable! It works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and costs about the same whether there are 1 or 1000 customers to serve. And it is more talented and conscientious in capturing data about the customer during a conversation than a human.

Why chat, messaging, at the expense of social networking? Because a public channel does not lend itself well to a highly personalized conversation, which is why customer relations on Facebook quickly end up in Messenger and on Twitter in private messages. And also because a robot, today, is still limited and if it goes wrong, it’ s preferable that it’s not in plain sight. Microsoft’s AI experiment on Twitter is the best example.

But even if I believe that with the progress of artificial intelligence robots will be able to bring more and more to the customer experience, in case of problem or specific request the robot hands over to a human. For servicing, when it is critical, the chat is more important than the bot. And the customer only recognizes the value of servicing when it is critical.

Towards the internalization of the chat bot

But, and this is the last episode of the story, we are witnessing the reappropriation of chat bots and more generally of chat by brands, airlines and hotels. The channel is gradually leaving the “general public” messaging apps to integrate the “proprietary” media of the brands, mainly their sites and mobile apps.

Why ? The reasons are multiple.

First the trust crisis towards Facebook in particular. It’s not that brands want to leave, but they are preparing for the day when their customers won’t be there anymore (young people have already left) or when for business or ethical reasons the collaboration with the social network will not be possible anymore.

Let us add that the development of tourism in China, Eldorado towards which all hotel chains and airlines are looking. When neither Facebook nor WhatsApp are accessible, you have to find another channel and multiplying your presence on all platforms has a cost.

Then there’ s the issue of data. A conversation is an opportunity to capture valuable customer data. However, everyone has understood its value and the big platforms prefer to keep a part of it for themselves, hence the interest for the brand that the conversation takes place “at home”.

I don’t doubt either that it is technically simpler to do certain things “at home” than by going through a third party channel that there’s less control over…provided we have the means.

Finally, and this is especially true for hotels, it helps to deploy a service logic, whether the hotelier wants it or not, because unlike air travel, a large part of the customer service is done directly with the hotel, not with the brand.

For example, in many Starwood hotels there was a feature called “Let’s Chat”. A phone number posted everywhere allowed you to contact the hotel via WhatsApp, iMessage or BBM (yes!) and ask (to a human) for information or services (restaurant reservation, room service etc). A practice that is really appreciated by customers but that not all hotels applied despite the group’s incentives. Sometimes the service did not exist, sometimes it existed but no one answered or randomly.

Since the acquisition of Starwood by Marriott, the service has leaved WhatsApp to integrate the mobile application. Double benefit: it forces hotels to play the game and the customer to download the app and join the loyalty program.

A negation of the customer experience?

But does all this really contribute to the customer experience? In all of the above examples, we start from the brand’s point of view and need, not the customer’s. And the customer not only doesn’t like to be dictated to but, as we know, is profoundly “omnichannel”.

Delta, which already had a chatbot capable of handing over to a human, is experimenting with bringing its service to Apple’s iMessage. Why ? Because they listened to the customer who told them that he preferred to talk to them in his personal messaging and on social networks, on the phone, or elsewhere. The starting point of the conversation could be a button on a site, in an email or whatever, but it will continue in iMessage.

We can’t wait for the results of Delta’s experimentation on iMessage, but one thing is for sure: the customer is thinking experience while brands are still thinking channel and technology. Brands incidentally (and insidiously) want to capture data while the customer is more and more sensitive to the subject.

Will it be possible to reconcile the two? I find it hard to believe.

Photo : Chat bot by NicoElNino via Shutterstock