Cathay Pacific Hopes New Chatbot Copes With Demand
- By CDOTrends editors
- October 03, 2022
Chatbots have been around for a while, but they are becoming increasingly popular and sophisticated as more businesses look to adopt them to improve customer experience. In the airline industry, bots can help customers with various tasks, from booking flights and checking in to providing customer service and even delivering flight information.
Cathay Pacific Airways has launched a conversational artificial intelligence (AI) platform powered by Fano Labs, a Hong Kong-based language AI company, to enhance its customers’ digital experience. The company said that the new AI platform would allow its chatbots to respond more accurately to customers' queries and help them complete their transactions more efficiently.
As demand for travel returns, Cathay is anticipating an increase in call and chat traffic volume, with post-COVID-19 travel inquiries snowballing in the past few months. The airline has also seen a shift in customer behavior, turning from traditional hotlines to digital channels such as WhatsApp and WeChat for more instant responses. Digital channel usage has experienced a monthly growth of 10-20% over recent months as Cathay continues adding more flight capacity.
Under the airline’s conversational AI roadmap, Cathay is optimizing its digital customer experience through the conversational AI developed in partnership with Fano Labs. Cathay Director Digital and IT Lawrence Fong said: “This collaborative effort in Conversational AI technology is the latest example of how we can work together with startups to develop mutually beneficial partnerships and ultimately bring benefits and enhanced service to our customers.”
To build a conversational AI chatbot, the most important yet challenging task is to find large volumes of high-quality data. The data will help train the chatbot to understand what people are asking and so as to provide proper responses. Chatbot training often takes a lot of time and money since humans must look at historical data to see how customers interacted with the chatbot, manually extract and clean the useful portions of this data, and then feed it back into the chatbot for learning.
Cathay and Fano Labs have developed and launched a platform called Conversational AI Training Excellence that uses AI technologies to train chatbots to address these challenges. The “Trainer AI” leverages Fano Labs’ Callinter product to analyze customer interactions, including voice calls, live chats, and WeChat messages. A human supervisor reviews and approves the results before they are passed on to the chatbot. The chatbot learns from this interaction and can process similar interactions faster.
Cathay expects to shorten the time necessary to train chatbots by 50%, from a regular 4-6 week learning cycle to 1-2 weeks. The company plans on using the solution to absorb more data, accelerate its ability to discover new topics, and improve the accuracy of chatbot responses.