Booking.com knows that travel can be stressful. In fact, it can be the most stressful thing you do, Booking.com Director of Service Process Design Gill Fisher said.
Flights get canceled, hotels get overbooked and plans change. That’s where Booking.com's customer service becomes a key part of the equation.
The travel platform is heavily investing in AI in customer service. But, human connection still matters, Fisher said, speaking at the Qualtrics X4 conference in Seattle last week. In fact, it’s what will differentiate Booking.com from its competitors.
“We truly believe that the differentiator is going to be the human connection,” Fisher said. “Yes, AI, and all the capabilities and technologies that come with it will help simplify, will help alternate those transactional queries that we get through to our call centers. But what's left after that? It's the really s----y conversations, the really emotional things, complex cases, and this is where we have to engage the agents that are still working with us and working for our brand and our brand advocates, enabling them with the right insight.”
But making sure the company's customer service is up to snuff is no small task.
Booking.com offers more than 31 million accommodations around the world, from hotels to home stays, 200 car suppliers and over 500 airlines, according to Fisher. People travel for all sorts of reasons, whether that's for work, a vacation, a wedding or a funeral. It’s important that Booking.com’s agents are able to differentiate between those things and address problems accordingly.
AI is helpful in determining what the customer actually needs in the first interaction, according to Stefan Fuczek, senior customer experience manager at Booking.com.
“So when they call, when they send us a message, when they email us, what is the essence that they want to convey towards us? With that insight, we can then route them towards the best solution,” Fuczek said.
Historically, that path of resolution was very much the one that the company preferred — towards self-service capabilities because that's easiest for the company.
“But guess what? The customers came back because they were already trying to self-serve, and it didn't succeed. So it created just another ticket, another contact, another interaction, another prospect,” he said.
Booking.com is also using AI in its chat function and to provide human agents context on the customer they’re speaking with.
“The customer, as soon as he reaches out, we have quite a lot of information,” Fuczek said. “We have bookings that they've done previously, they've traveled on previous occasions. We have that information. We can summarize that information. We can digest that information for our agents then to pick up and say, ‘Oh, that traveler has just traveled to Seattle on a plane that was delayed.’”
That commitment to human connection is going to be the difference between it and the next online travel agency, Fuczek said.
“We are the biggest online travel agency in the book, but we have big competition. We are all in that same journey in time, trying to understand what technology can do and how we can use it to create a better qualitative outcome,” Fuczek said. “So the actual difference that we can make is in those moments when customers reach out to us and they don't talk to technology, they don't talk to AI or other kind of functionality. They talk to a human.”
The difference, Fuczek said, is that at Booking.com customers will talk to representatives who have the ability to go one level deeper to solve their issue. “That's where we believe that we can create a competitive advantage. We will remain the biggest [online travel agency] because we're building those connections,” he said.
Providing helpful and empathetic customer service also plays a practical role in customer lifetime value, according to Fisher.
Contact center leaders might look at customer satisfaction or first contact resolution averages or any number of metrics, but the ultimate goal isn’t to be efficient or keep costs down.
“The reason that we're ultimately here is to create lifetime value. You wouldn't be here. You wouldn't have a business if your customers weren't getting back to you,” she said.
