Delighting travelers should be as simple as a conversation along the entire journey

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Managing a trip should feel like magic

My company, LivePerson, has a pretty simple mission for the large brands we work with – make it easier to communicate with their consumers.

We’ve been doing a pretty good job at it too, having been at this for over 20 years managing more than 50M conversations a month for 18,000+ innovative brands.

Just as we do with our own friends and family, we think getting what you need from a brand should be as simple as just asking for it.

Certainly magic is the way it should feel to your consumers, but you better believe a lot goes into making that magic happen behind the scenes.

E-commerce is not a 2-way conversation

The need for 2-way conversations is because e-commerce has failed us in a lot of ways, and it's the reason why people still shop in stores today or why guests continue to come up to your concierge desk to ask questions.

In fact, less than 5% of people who visit a web site, actually buy something. On the customer care side, about 70% of phone calls start from someone visiting your site because they couldn’t get the answers they need, so they end up just calling you.

Picture that – your customers came to you in a digital channel, but have to get resolved in an analog one. You’ve spent all this money to optimize your website and tons on digital marketing for only 70% of them to pick up the phone and call you when they have a question or an issue.

In today's world, shouldn’t there be a better experience?

In fact, customer service is so bad, it's the butt of jokes

Besides being expensive – calling a contact center is just down right painful. Customer service is so bad, it’s becoming the butt of jokes in the media.

Here's a great article in the Washington Post from Geoffrey Fowler and a treat of a video, with Rainn Wilson comically showing us the rage that ensues when calling customer service. It's only funny because it's so true!

Time to go asynchronous

The massive opportunity that exists for brands is moving to the world of asynchronous communication.

Phone calls and traditional web chat are session-based, which means they have a definitive beginning and end – most times ending when you don’t want them to!

However with messaging, instead of starting the conversation over every time, it’s simply a persistent thread, just as we experience when you text a loved one. Because it’s asynchronous, the conversation can also carry over across devices and different messaging platforms.

Here’s what will happen pretty quickly: Once your customers get a taste of messaging you instead of calling, they’re going to expect it everywhere – on your website, inside your app, when they’re on social media, when they’re talking to Google Assistant and so on.

But worse, if they experience this convenience with your competitor, they will expect it from your brand too. If you can’t offer the same level of service, you then start to have problems!

The fastest way we have found to get your customers conversational is through IVR deflection. I hate that word deflection, but that’s the idea.

Someone calls into your IVR, and they’re prompted with an option – stay on the line and hold for 15 – 20 mins, or opt into receiving a message and carry on the conversation there.

Without doing anything special, other than offering the option to message high up in the IVR tree, 30% of your customers will automatically opt into messaging.

In fact one of our large customers, Sky in the UK, was able to shift 30% of their call volume to messaging in less than 100 days. This year, they're on target for almost 70%.

The interesting stat we also see is that when you offer the option to call next to messaging as a contact method, such as in your mobile app, hands down, 75% of them will choose the message option.

But it shouldn’t stop there. We’re now taking it a step further and allowing brands to start a conversation on a voice assistant, like Alexa, and then pick up the conversation on their smartphone in a messaging application, like Facebook Messenger, later on.

What a fully conversational travel brand looks like

Conversational commerce allows you to interact with your customers on a personal, 1:1 basis throughout the entire consumer journey.

So that could start with asking Siri – "hey Siri, I need a hotel room in SoHo New York." Then a few days later I consider choices for that room, like does it have a view, and maybe I do that on your website through web messaging.

Then further down the road, I receive a calendar reminder about the big event, perhaps it’s celebrating an anniversary with my wife, and so I use Apple Business Chat to actually make the reservation. And because it’s our 10 year, I opt for the deluxe suite after seeing a list of photo options.

Then during my trip, maybe I need help with my stay, and I interact with you via SMS for extra towels, a bottle of champagne or restaurant recommendations.

Then after my trip, I can be engaged when I reach certain milestones, like 75 stays for the year or 500,000 points, and you can help plan my next trip, say using WhatsApp, which allows you to send proactive messages.

When going conversational, you can expect these 6 benefits:

1. Customer Satisfaction increases on average by 20% - in fact we’ve seen a peak of 95%.
2. Your messaging agents in the contact center are going to be 2 – 4x more efficient than your voice agents, because they can handle more conversations concurrently.
3. That efficiency cuts your support labor costs in half.
4. We also see a 50% drop in agent attrition. That’s because they’re much happier and less stressed messaging than answering phone calls. They can listen to music, ask co-workers for help and take their time to respond with thoughtful answers.
5. We also see that it helps drive 4x more sales and a 25% increase in Average Order Value (AOV) because it’s easier to transact, and products and services are more personalized to the individual.
6. That experience then leads to more loyal customers and decreases customer churn by 20%.

This is what a fully conversational brand can expect over time:

How do you navigate all of this?

There are essentially 4 components you need to have in place. Think of the magic as this:

1. First, you need to connect with consumers where they are spending all of their time. So you need a single integration into all of the conversational channels.
2. Second, you need to manage all of those conversations at scale and route them to the appropriate skilled department based on their intent (and in some cases their sentiment).
3. Third, you need to handle that conversation with the appropriate responder – that could be automated for basic intents or a human for more nuanced and complex queries.
4. Finally, all of that needs to deeply integrate into your enterprise systems, so you can pull up relevant information about that customer – from your reservations or property management system, to your CRM, to your loyalty program and more.

It all looks something like this:

And you can’t forget about your agents. They don’t want 9 different windows and dashboards to have to work from. They want and need one master console to manage all digital conversations across messaging, social and voice assistant channels.

A great conversational experience needs bots up front, and beyond

To manage conversations at scale, you’re going to need bots and humans working alongside each other seamlessly. We call it tango. In fact your agents are a huge asset in your company and make some of the best conversational designers. They already know how to converse with customers, so use them to make the bots great!

When a bot is deployed, agents can manage the bot and watch it in real-time. If the bot starts to have issues, they can jump in and take over the conversation and help make the bots smarter over time.

Instead of this gloomy threat of AI taking over jobs, we’re seeing agents move to becoming bot trainers and using the bots to handle the majority of conversations, while they take care of the more enjoyable, high-touch experiences.

For most travel brands, we’ve analyzed a lot of conversations and actually find that over 54% of the conversations can be automated.

It’s also not overly complex. Most conversational drivers are limited to a handful of intents, and they typically drop off after the top 3 or 4. Your brand is already sitting on a gold mine of data to construct this automation – from your chat and voice transcripts, to your site FAQs. Use these as a starting point to build your automation database.

We have also found that designing automated conversations is very different than designing for the web. Here are a few key principles we’ve learned around deploying with bots:

• First, be transparent - tell your customer they are speaking to a bot vs a human using icons or avatars.
• Since it’s messaging, keep the text short and to the point. There's no need to try to build rapport or ask how their day is going. It's messaging, not chat - so treat it appropriately.
• Also response time is important – in fact, one of our customers in Japan noticed that when the bot responded to an inquiry too quickly, it freaked the customers out.
• Set appropriate SLAs and response times like “I’ll be back in 10 mins,” and because it’s asynchronous, that is perfectly fine, because I’ll likely message you, put my phone down, and then get back to whatever it is I’m doing.

Not all bots are created equal, so don't limit yourself to just one chatbot. You’ll want to do A/B testing and make some bots specialists, just as you would train an agent to be a skilled expert. We find that specialist bots can contain up to 96% of inquiries.

Here's a great chatbot experience from the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas that ties all of this together.

I sit on the enterprise strategic account team with leading global conversational commerce platform, LivePerson (NASDAQ: LPSN). I work with the world's largest travel brands to implement a best-of-breed technology stack that will transform the customer care and sales experience to digital messaging, leveraging bots, AI and a proven operational blueprint. Follow me on Twitter @BrandonTechExec and read more about LivePerson news here.

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