Travel tech bosses on chatbots and the need for human interaction

Carlson Wagonlit Travel is running several chatbot pilots to see how and where the technology can best help the travel management company and its customers.

The first pilot is used for “non-value-creating tasks” such as minor booking changes or straightforward transactions where the bot can assess what’s required and fulfill the request.

Highlighting some of the challenges with bots, CWT head of new product incubation Utpal Kaul says that it needs to be able to gauge intent using natural language processing and tell the difference between the verb "book" and the noun.

He adds that the company is seeing “robust results” in its test to gauge adoption rates with a 50% engagement rate for simple things such as offering travelers an hotel option when it sees a flight has been booked.

The second pilot is for a hybrid bot which hands off queries it cannot answer to a human agent. 

Kaul, who was speaking the TravelForward conference at World Travel Market this week, says it all happens in the back end, with the customer unaware which part is a human interaction and which is the bot.

Some questioned the potential damage to a brand if bots were getting volumes of queries wrong, and Kaul acknowledges the technology has to be robust enough to pick up on intent. 

He adds that the hybrid bot uses machine learning so that it learns from giving a wrong answer or handing a query to a human agent.

“It is a matter of iterations, and the more iterations, the better it becomes. The results are very impressive. For the user it does not matter as long was you are getting the answer you want as quickly as possible.”

Doubts

Other travel companies feel less confident in the chatbot technology. Rail Europe chief information officer Didier Pinson says the company is “reluctant” to put everything into a bot and that it uses the technology for simple requests.

Gunjan Verma, chief technology officer of the Travel Corporation, believes it’s important for companies to be transparent about when it’s a bot and when it’s a human so that consumer trust is not impacted.

Many feel that technology can help with trust but that there’s a time and place for it. Booking.com regional director for Northern Europe Joost Vermeulen believes bots should only be used when it makes sense.

“if you have a simple question like adding a bed to a room or asking if there’s a parking space available, you will probably want to interact with a bot to have instant answers, but if your flight is stuck and you cannot reach your destination, you want a to talk to a human who’s helping you with a real issue."

He was speaking at a later session on customer centricity and adds that the company is also trying to bring together the technology and human interaction to figure out when the customer in interested in the technology and when the company needs to pick up the phone.