Travel Contact Centres Stay Alert With WatchTower AI
Background: the travel industry
The travel industry is a spinning plate that can stop at any time.
When plates are spinning they are militant in rhythm. They flow in the air to a beat the rest of the world understands. There is a set cadence, a pattern which we accept. External factors like Covid-19 can alter this rhythm.
What happens when a gust of wind comes along and changes the pattern of spin. Order is lost and the plates crash to the floor. What was so simple is now irregular, without pattern: an anomaly.
What is anomaly detection?
At EdgeTier, we believe that machine learning, and in particular “anomaly detection”, techniques, can play a valuable role in monitoring contact centre metrics and alerting management when unusual activity is detected.
That’s why we’ve built Watchtower; a customer service tool that uses AI to monitor your entire contact operations, customers conversations and contact centre activity for unusual patterns, alerting contact centre manger's when those patterns indicate a possible issue
Client Focus: Holiday Extras
Holiday Extras are the UK market leader in travel extras, providing services for over seven million travellers a year across multiple product lines. Managing customer contact in a volatile and fast moving marketplace customer service team is challenging. Customer conversation topics vary wildly based on external events, and customer service metrics dramatically change from minute to minute. There are frequent unexpected spikes in contact, spanning website issues, weather events, pandemic alerts, and travel restrictions.
Recently, their contact centre experienced a spike in queries from concerned customers contacting about newly introduced Covid-19 Tier 3 restrictions.
Confused guests anticipated changes to their bookings began to ask about Tier 3’s implications to their travel add-ons. This confusion led to what we describe as an anomaly.
WatchTower: Real-Time Monitoring and Alerting
Holiday Extras use EdgeTier's WatchTower AI to monitor all chat conversations in real-time. WatchTower sends real-time alerts to the Holiday Extras management team as new or unexpected issues arise and provides them with a detailed understanding of the issues that customers are having. WatchTower also allows Holiday Extras to explain the drivers behind issues that impact SLAs and CSAT scores.
Full-Screen Interactions
We have doubled down on our search screen. You'll now notice that when opening an interaction on the search screen, you should now see a new full-screen button. This will open any call, chat, or email on a separate page. This should be useful for sharing interactions with other people as you will now be able to copy and paste the URL.
Want to see these features in action get in touch today.
Figure 1. An example of a WatchTower Alert.
WatchTower Alert — Detecting abnormal behaviour
As an EdgeTier client Holiday Extras management team were alerted by Watchtower's notification alert. This ensured their team were able to respond to the issue faster than ensuing order was restored.
AI monitoring and alerting— Solving issues before they impact customers
To put it in perspective anomaly detection is a branch of statistics and computer science that focuses on the detection of rare, unusual, or new events which may occur within a system.
WatchTower ensures Holiday Extra spend less time searching dashboards for customer issues. Edgetier's contact centre AI monitors your customer conversations and contact centre activity for unusual patterns helping to reduce the time-to-reaction stage.
As a WatchTower user, Holiday Extras will be notified to any outliers that may pass through their travel contact centre.
Peace of mind with intuitive AI that learns with you
The main technical challenge posed by anomaly detection is that in most real world applications, there is no labelled data which identifies all the different anomalies which can occur within a particular system.
In short, WatchTower will learn what "normal" looks like at your contact centre: what your customers speak about, who's in the queue, what agents are online. You’ll get alerted when things aren't right.
Conclusion - Weathering the storm
In the uncertainty of 2021 travel contact centre teams need the right tools to deliver a stellar service that will help keep customers onside and keep standards high.
With more data to understand the specific issues their customers are having Holiday Extra can resolve issues quickly, reduce and meet customer expectations. Watchtower can offer you the tools to weather every storm quickly.
