Machine learning is revolutionizing the organizational structure of many industries. An airline chatbot is one such revolution brought by machine learning in the aviation industry.
The aviation industry was renowned for the poor customer service they provide. The poor customer service was because of flight delays, overbooking, and inability to answer enormous customer queries, among other issues. The aviation industry came up with airline chatbot as a solution to improve most of the services offered. Chatbots have been around for a while, but the recent few years have seen a spike in their use. Chatbots have become the buzzword of the aviation industry. According to estimates, 68% of airlines will be using AI-powered chatbots by the end of 2020.
Chatbots use Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning to handle conversations, and they respond according to the request made by the customer. Chatbots can provide seamless customer service, but, nowadays, people do not have any tolerance for waiting until their request is fulfilled. For instance, if a customer comes up with an unusual request a chatbot can not give a solution by itself. The customer will have to wait for a long time to get the request completed. These may lead to the customer getting a poor overall experience. Similarly, many more benefits and disadvantages of chatbots as explored below:
Chatbots can assist the customer in planning the trip, providing airline information, and searching for flights, among others. Customer engagement can be increased in many different ways by using a chatbot. But, simple chatbots work from a limited database, and only complex chatbots can learn and improvise themselves in a better way. The chatbots that can learn and continuously update themselves are way more expensive than the simple ones. Along with the advantages also come drawbacks of a system.
The customer likes quick responses to queries and getting satisfactory answers, and this can be achieved with the use of a chatbot, as a chatbot can work 24 hours a day. Chatbots can help save a lot of costs as a single chatbot can be used in multiple areas in a business. They can be used to achieve increased customer satisfaction and increased customer engagement by providing quick and better customer service.
Using chatbots may provide faster customer service, but they aren’t perfect. Simple chatbots may not be able to learn new things themselves, which can get them confused, and the conversation may end up becoming a loop. Chatbots can help save a lot of manpower, but even self-learning chatbots require to be programmed differently for every new business, which may increase the initial installation cost. Self-learning chatbots may learn something that it was not supposed to learn. For example, a chatbot launched via twitter ended up posting offensive tweets.
Although the use of airline chatbots has improved the customer service provided by the aviation industry, they cannot handle everything without human intervention. Hence, chatbots and humans must work hand in hand to improve the overall experience of the customer, at least until robotic stewards and customer service personnel become a reality.