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News Plus 15 Oct 2024 - 5 min read
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ROBOT CHICKEN: QANTAS EXEC REVEALS THREE AI CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE EXPERIMENTS

By Andrew Birmingham - Martech | Ecom | CX Editor

Succulent CX: Qantas' Scott Wilkinson says customer experience is a key AI use
case.

Market Voice 3 min read
 

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By Vanessa Lyons - CEO, ThinkNewsBrands | Partner Content


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Tags: customer experience Generative AI

Qantas' brand has taken a roasting in recent years. But thanks to artificial
intelligence, it's no longer serving up dry chicken. Since taking the helm from
Alan Joyce, new chief Vanessa Hudson has made customer experience key to the
trust rebuild – and AI is playing an increasing role. Scott Wilkinson, executive
manager, digital and direct customer experience, outlined three early CX use
cases during a panel discussion at SXSW this week: Ticketing; giving customer
agents additional firepower; and spotting and solving problems and complaints –
e.g. paltry poultry – as they emerge rather than months later.





What you need to know:

 * Qantas used AI for years to do things like plan the most fuel-efficient
   flight paths or extract value from its trove of customer loyalty data.
 * But AI forays into customer experience are more nascent. 
 * Gen AI in particular could present a salve for a company whose brand
   perception has tanked in recent years due to poor customer experiences,
   particularly following lockdowns.
 * Executive manager, digital and direct customer experience, Scott
   Wilkinson, outlined three use cases Qantas is investing in; a better
   ticketing process, better-informed agents, and the chance to compress the
   time between the identification of customer problems, and their resolution. 
 * One upshot? No customers spitting feathers over dry chicken. 

If you are lucky you might get 2,000 comments a week about food in total, and on
a specific route you may even get 20 around... but we're now able to intervene
almost immediately and uplift that customer experience.

— Scott Wilkinson, Executive Manager, Digital and Direct Customer Experience,
Qantas

Cock a doodle don'ts

Qantas has long applied more established forms of artificial intelligence to
drive efficiency and better outcomes in its business processes. Now it's
investigating a range of use cases, according to executive manager, digital and
direct customer experience Scott Wilkinson, some of which seem tailor-made for
generative AI in particular.

“We've been toying around with AI for quite a few years now,” he told a SXSW
audience in Sydney. “If you think about the operations, we've been using it for
a few years to help with our flight planning because there are a multitude of
factors that go into picking the most direct route to minimise things like fuel
burn.”

AI has likewise played a key role in Qantas’s Loyalty business, which has a huge
data repository, he said. Mining that data faster and acting on it smarter
delivers better value for members and for the businesses' bottom line.

When it comes to customer experience, he said the airline is very much still at
the foundational stage when considering the impact of the large language models
that underpin gen AI, as opposed to the more traditional AI approaches. But
there's a rebuild underway, and Qantas sees upside.

Qantas was Australia's strongest brand in 2019 per Brand Finance, but like
global industry peers it was smacked by the Covid shutdown and fell to 7th
by 2022. Then it suffered problems of its own making, mismanaging its response
the the reopening of the economy, fending off accusations of profiteering amid
nosediving customer service and seemingly gripped by a cultural malaise that
culminated in then CEO Alan Joyce blaming his customers for the airline's poor
operational performance.

In 2023 the airline took a big reputational hit amid brooding customer service
angst that saw the national carrier's brand drop to 41st in the rankings
and warnings of financial backlash from the fallout.

It was a low point not lost on incoming Qantas chief Vanessa Hudson. She
addressed the issue in one of her early public statements in the hot seat.

“We know that millions of Australians rely on us and we’ve heard their feedback
loud and clear. There’s a lot of work happening to lift our service levels and
the early signs are really positive. Our customer satisfaction scores have
bounced back strongly since December and we have more service and product
improvements in the pipeline," she stated.

Wilkinson told SXSW delegates that Qantas is gaining CX altitude while aiming to
avoid turbulence: “We are investing pretty heavily [in customer experience], but
we're taking our time getting that right.”

He called out three use cases in particular; the ticketing processes, helping
customer service agents; getting deeper insights into customer experience, and
responding to them more quickly.



"If I were to think about three use cases that we're using right now, the first
one would be the process of ticketing. Just getting a ticket to someone is
incredibly complex. You've got multiple airlines that you've got to talk to, and
it can be hugely time-consuming," he said.

As well as making that process less painful, Qantas aims to simultaneously
enable its people to focus more on service and less on navigating system
inefficiencies.



Freer range

“The second use case the airline is currently working on involves helping agents
in their conversations with customers," said Wilkinson. “It’s no secret, we've
had to train a lot of agents over the last few years, and we learned a lot
through that.”

Call centre workforces can be fairly transient, but Qantas also has a lot of
long-term employees with deep organisational history and practice knowledge,
according to Wilkinson.

“So how do you try and bridge that gap, to make sure that a customer's getting a
really good experience, whether they're talking to an agent that's been with us
for a couple of months, versus being with us for in some cases, 30 to 40 years.”

The impression he left is that generative AI is being considered as a way to
simplify access to historical knowledge and Qantas' systems to help the
company’s agents get better answers faster and to help determine the next best
actions that stem from the conversation.

“Finally, and probably the one I'm the most excited about is the way that we're
using it to generate insights to directly impact the customer experience,” he
said.

“We get a lot of feedback from our customers, and we've started to run it
through a lot of the models, and we're able to get some pretty tangible insights
out of it fairly quickly and easily.”

Dry chickens

Wilkinson gave the example of a recent new menu launch, and what could be
learned from feedback.

“We uploaded all the feedback, and we found out that in Asia and New Zealand,
the feedback on the chicken wasn't any good. It was dry. I jumped on the plane
and ordered the chicken the next day, and sure enough, it was really dry.”

But he said it’s a great example of a use case (for AI, not in-flight dining):
“You ask it a question, bring something back, and what we actually are able to
tangibly do with that was to intervene, change the menu, and adapt off the back
of that.”

In most cases, he said Qantas would struggle to get enough customer responses in
a week about food in general to be able to make confident decisions.

“If you are lucky you might get 2,000 comments a week about food in total, and
on a specific route you may even get around 20.”

At that rate it would take months to uncover problems by which stage the menu
would likely have changed.

“But we're able to intervene almost immediately and uplift that customer
experience.”

Fluffy matters

Qantas’s desire to better discern more precise user intent quickly and act on it
is now widely observable across industries as customer-experience platform
majors start to roll out generative AI capability at scale.

Hilton is another firm notching some early successes. Like Qantas, the hotel
group uses Qualtrics' CX platform, although it's not known if Qantas is using
the platform for its early gen AI forays.

According to Becky Polebaum, Vice President, Enterprise & Customer Analytics at
Hilton, the company collects and synthesises feedback across the entire guest
journey for its more than 7,600 global properties. 

She likewise had an anecdote similar to Wilkinson’s. Rather than dry chickens,
it was the drying capacity or otherwise of its towels that drew the customers’
ire.

It's the small things that add-up. Spotting them and fixing them fast and
systemically shows customers they actually are at the centre of the business,
versus telling them they are.






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