IndiGo, Air India leverage AI-based tools to improve customer care service delivery

Two of India's largest airlines, IndiGo and Air India, are deploying AI-based tools in their customer care operations to ensure that a maximum number of customer queries are resolved at the virtual assistant level. 

The airlines aim to minimise the time taken to address passenger queries and increase the efficiency of its customer care operations with this move.

For instance, India’s largest domestic carrier IndiGo, which caters to three out of five flyers in India, told Mint that following the implementation of its chatbot 6Eskai in November 2023, it has witnessed a 75% decline in the workload of its customer service agents.

The low-cost carrier had developed 6Eskai in collaboration with Microsoft. The company's artificial intelligence chatbot is powered by OpenAI's large multimodal language model GPT-4, which is adept in generating text from textual and visual input.

“We have seen over 6,000 bookings made through 6Eskai over the website and mobile application. From March 2024 till date, over 39,000 boarding passes have been issued through the chatbot,” an IndiGo spokesperson told Mint. 

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“The 6Eskai application is currently transferring only 2-9% of chats to experts, as compared to Dottie (virtual chat assistant), which was transferring 14- 19% chats, thereby boosting efficiency by about 5%.”

“We also conduct daily scans of the customer chat interactions to improve the overall experience of our customers with regard to the AI chatbot,” the spokesperson added.

Keeping up with competition

The Tata group-backed Air India, the largest international operator in the Indian market, has also started seeing the impact of virtual assistants powered by generative artificial intelligence on its customer care operations. 

Generative AI or genAI is artificial intelligence that can create original content, such as text, images and video, among others, from similar cues provided to it.

Air India had deployed a generative AI virtual agent ‘AI.g’ in 2023, which has handled more than two million customer queries so far. Normally, these queries would have required the assistance of a customer service agent in the absence of AI.g. 

Following its deployment, Air India has managed to get a containment ratio of 93%, which means that only 7% of customer queries are escalated to a human agent. 

The airline's virtual agent handles over 1,300 topics and provides human-like responses and uses ‘general knowledge,’ which was absent in earlier versions of the AI-based tool, the airline said.

Attaining tech supremacy

Air India is in the process of incorporating computer vision technologies in its mobile application to enhance customer experience. It is also working on deploying artificial intelligence in a variety of marketing areas across its website and mobile application platform.

“Besides the consumer use cases, we are using AI, in particular Generative AI, in core enterprise use cases. For example, we have developed a CoPilot plugin on Microsoft Teams, so that users can ask natural language questions about any specific areas of our function or performance,” an Air India spokesperson told Mint.

Also Read: Air India aims to double transit international traffic

“AI use will be pervasive in Air India,” the spokesperson added. The use of artificial intelligence and other related technologies is expected to further increase over the next one to two years. 

According to travel and tourism tech solutions firm Amadeus, the usage of artificial intelligence in areas around servicing, customer support, digital virtual assistant will increase over time, and Indian airlines are already assessing ways in which AI-based tools can help them to push the most relevant information to travellers during their journeys.