Transforming passenger experience with data and predictive AI

The travel industry is at a crossroads. Discerning travelers crave seamless experiences, from booking to returning home. Meanwhile, travel providers grapple with unknown passenger data and a single customer view, rising costs due to fuel prices and high interest rates, staffing challenges, and a shift towards low-carbon travel.

Here's the good news: Exceptional travel experiences remain the key to customer loyalty and growth. By leveraging data and predictive artificial intelligence (AI), travel companies can de-anonymize their passenger data, streamline the booking process, generate world-class customer loyalty, and build brand champions. 

Data and AI: The engines of transformation

Moving from static operations to dynamic systems requires real-time data, automation, and predictive AI. Data integration and AI-driven insights can unlock cost savings and growth opportunities. Similarly, delivering automation, AI, and real-time data across all departments fosters a deeper understanding and stronger relationship with passengers. 

Optimizing operations with data and predictive AI

Data and AI are poised to revolutionize travel companies by transforming individual departments. Here's how:

• Contact centers: AI-powered chatbots that handle routine inquiries will free up human agents for complex issues. These chatbots can leverage passenger data to personalize interactions and support queries, reducing resolution times and increasing customer satisfaction. For instance, a chatbot could access a passenger's booking details and offer to rebook a missed flight or answer questions about baggage allowances. To ensure the chatbot provides relevant and accurate information, it can be trained on a specific dataset from the travel provider.

• Sales and marketing: Predictive, targeted campaigns based on passenger data boost conversion rates and deliver personalized travel offers. We've found that a sophisticated data platform like Salesforce Data Cloud has been a game-changer in this. By unifying customer data across all touchpoints, marketers can create laser-targeted campaigns based on past purchases, travel preferences, and browsing behavior. This allows for highly personalized travel offers that are more likely to resonate with each passenger, leading to increased conversion rates and revenue growth.

• Data-driven decisions: Analytics unlock passenger behavior, allowing for optimized operations, improved resource allocation, and better service planning. With a powerful analytics suite, travel companies can tap into the wealth of data they possess about passenger behavior—for example, analyzing booking patterns to identify peak travel times and optimize resource allocation. Data can also be used to understand passenger preferences for specific amenities or destinations, allowing companies to tailor their offerings and improve service planning.

Unlocking the power of data: A holistic view of the passenger journey 

Beyond departmental improvements, data consolidation plays a crucial role. Here's how it unlocks the full potential of data and AI:

• De-anonymized passenger data: Revenue lines are strengthened by gaining a clearer understanding of your customer base, then reaching those audiences through targeted advertising and personalized offers. Technological solutions like customer data platforms enable the integration of previously siloed data sets, creating a unified profile for each passenger. By de-anonymising passenger data (with consent, of course), you gain a deeper understanding of your customer base. This empowers you to identify new revenue opportunities, such as targeted advertising or personalized travel packages.

• Data storage optimization: Millions of records can create storage nightmares. Data optimization techniques ensure efficient storage and retrieval, boosting operational efficiency. Based on our experience, Salesforce Data Cloud, as a hyperscale data platform, can handle massive datasets efficiently. This eliminates storage bottlenecks and streamlines data management, boosting operational efficiency and allowing you to focus on extracting insights from your data.

• Case management: Consolidated passenger data provides a holistic view of each customer journey, allowing for faster and more effective case resolution. Picture a world where all passenger interactions, from booking inquiries to post-trip feedback, are consolidated in one place. This holistic view of each customer journey empowers contact centers to deliver exceptional support by having all relevant information at their fingertips. 

By leveraging data and AI effectively, travel companies can transform the passenger experience, optimize operations, and unlock a new era of growth. 

A real-world example: A large travel operator transforms the customer experience 

As one of the largest travel operators in Britain, this company runs more than 20% of all local bus services with a fleet of nearly 9,000 buses carrying 2.9 million passengers a day in more than 40 major towns and cities. They also run passenger rail services in the UK. The company aims to increase existing customer travel, attract new customers (particularly those who currently rely on cars), and strategically position themselves for cross-selling opportunities in the electric vehicle (EV) market.

Facing challenges such as limited visibility into customer data, fragmented data across multiple platforms, and manual loading of data for marketing campaigns, they have partnered with Credera to implement a robust data-driven customer experience (CX) strategy leveraging Salesforce Data Cloud and AI solutions.

• They will use these solutions to collect real-time purchase and usage data. This will enable highly targeted campaigns based on browsing behavior.

• To enhance customer communication across channels, they will deploy Salesforce Data Cloud with a real-time API connection to all channels, purchases, and usage events.

• The implementation of personalization modules will allow them to capture browsing behavior even before account creation, opening up the ability to build segments for the creation of highly personalized targeted campaigns.

• In addition, Service Cloud deployment will equip the contact center with better knowledge and case management tools.

Naturally, charting a course to a utopian data-driven customer experience doesn’t happen overnight! To help navigate this path, the travel operator partnered with Credera, who provided expert guidance every step of the way. They adopted a new approach, which follows the "crawl, walk, run, fly" framework developed by Credera.  This framework served as a roadmap for driving meaningful change and consisted of the following phases:

• Crawl: Focus on basic data collection and connectivity to improve passenger engagement.

• Walk: Introduce customer analytics and intelligence for data-driven decision-making.

• Run: Democratise data and leverage real-time personalization across channels.

• Fly: Implement real-time personalization for anonymous visitors and customers, driving engagement and conversions.

The expected results of the project include increased revenue, data democratization for better decision-making, and a sophisticated, data-driven, 360-degree view to unlock a new era of customer experience excellence for their passengers. Data and AI are transforming the travel industry. By embracing these powerful tools, travel companies can create seamless experiences, enhance customer satisfaction, optimize operations, and drive revenue.

Take the next step to unlock the future of travel within your company. Contact us to organize a personal consultation to explore how data and AI solutions can revolutionize your company operations and create the seamless travel experiences that today's passengers demand.

Ready to build your personalized CX roadmap? Download the Customer Experience Transformation Worksheet to start planning and shaping your own customer experience journey. You can directly edit the downloaded PDF or print out the worksheet and fill it in, carefully considering each question and how it aligns with your company's specific needs.

• Data Strategy
• AI
• Salesforce