Скачать или смотреть New Way Now: loveholidays powers smoother travel experiences with Google Cloud AI

Featured in this video: Eugene Neale, director of AI at loveholidays

Summary: UK-based travel agency loveholidays is innovating with generative AI to build more love with customers across Europe. Using Google Cloud’s conversational AI technology and AI platform, loveholidays developed an AI agent named Sandy that enhances the company’s ability to deliver more efficient, satisfying customer experience. Sandy helps 55% of loveholidays customers get an answer to their question in less than a minute, allowing the company to scale support with the same number of people — ultimately leading to £3 million in operational cost savings last year.

Challenge: As one of the UK’s fastest-growing online travel agencies, loveholidays was looking for a way to scale its contact center cost-effectively without impacting the support experiences of its rapidly expanding customer base.

Solution: Using Contact Center AI (now Customer Engagement Suite with Google AI) and Dialogflow (now Conversational Agents), loveholidays initially developed Sandy as a simple chatbot to handle a small portion of customer inquiries. As Google Cloud has advanced its conversational AI and agent technologies with Dialogflow CX, loveholidays has transformed Sandy into a powerful AI agent that is available 24/7 to provide personalized guidance in a quick and natural way. The ability to use generators in Dialogflow CX to leverage gen AI models from Vertex AI has helped bring a more personalized touch to conversations, allowing loveholidays to use its customer data to help shape and define agent responses. With Sandy lending a helping hand, loveholidays reduced the workload on its human agents while giving them back valuable time to focus on more complex cases. In addition, CCAI and Dialogflow’s multilingual support is now enabling loveholidays to bring Sandy to other countries with the confidence it can scale up and start engaging with customers quickly.

Results: With Google Cloud, loveholidays is delivering frictionless customer service experiences — no matter the scale or demand. Today, Sandy helps more than 55% of loveholidays’ customers get fast, accurate, and high-quality answers to their questions in less than a minute. This efficiency gain has reduced the repetitive workload of loveholidays’ contact center staff, allowing them to focus on more complex cases. It’s also allowed the company to scale the amount of customers they’re supporting with the same number of people, leading to £3 million in operational cost savings last year.

Key takeaways and highlights from our interview with Eugene Neale, Director of AI at loveholidays:

→ “We started with Contact Center AI and Dialogflow — relatively simple chatbots. And as Google’s capabilities have increased, we want to scale into multi-language capabilities. We’ve reached Germany with the same technology and know that we can start scaling very quickly.”

→ “Language is at the heart of how we scale. Sandy is this caring voice of loveholidays to actually guide [customers] through getting the task they want done. Sandy has been very impactful for us as a business — about 55% of our customers get an answer to their questions in less than a minute. It’s fast, accurate customer service without any need to wait.”

→ “[Sandy] has dramatically improved our operation cost. We’ve never had to get rid of anyone because of AI, but we’ve been able to scale the amount of customers we’re supporting with the same number of people — and that operational savings is about three million a year.”

→ “As Google Cloud's technology matures, what used to take us weeks and months is now taking us hours and days — and you can see that's going to be coming down to minutes and hours. We’re going to be able to deliver more and more amazing experiences for our customers and more optimizations for our business faster.”

Google Cloud products used: Customer Engagement Suite with Google AI, Conversational Agents

Learn more:

→ Conversational Agents: https://goo.gle/3WlSQJD

→ Customer Engagement Suite with Google AI: https://goo.gle/3CacRMa

→ loveholidays improving the contact center experience with conversational AI: https://goo.gle/3PBPf6s