Artificial Intelligence and Chatbots are revolutionising and hugely impacting the ways Brands are engaging with their customers throughout the Customer Journey.

1. Using AI and chatbots to better
engage with customers
throughout their journey
Youvraj Seeam
28 Feb. 2019
Airline

2. “Airline Marketers are data
rich and insight poor”

3. On the customer experience
battleground, airlines who invest
in getting to know their
passengers will win.
Source : Boxever

4. Digital Evolution

5. Artificial Intelligence is any code,
technique or algorithm that enables
machines to mimic, develop &
demonstrate human cognition and
behaviour

6. Foundational building blocks and key elements
• Artificial intelligence is built on the foundation of two technologies:
• Machine Learning (ML) and
• Natural Language Processing (NLP).
• Deep learning and Natural Language Understanding extend its capabilities.

7. Source : NVIDIA

9. Data science / Data Mining and Knowledge
Discovery in Databases

10. Analytics Maturity Model

11. Modern - Airline Customer Journey

12. Possible Futuristic - Airline Customer Journey

13. What does Customers value?
Source : Amadeus

14. Driving Engagement with technology
• Website
• Login
• Guest
• Chatbot
• Email
• Mobile Apps
• Push messaging

15. New Generation of Content Management System - Website
• AI is able to dynamically change the look and feel of a website in real time, as
travelers engage with it,
• Dramatically boost conversions, whether it’s to sell a seat upgrade,
a more direct flight or special offers for their trip.
And it can do this where airlines need it most, for return visitors or customers
enrolled in loyalty programs.

16. PERSONALISATION: THE WHAT, HOW AND WHY
• Showing the same content to every website visitor is a bit like serving
the same meal for dinner every day. And for breakfast and lunch.
Today’s digital marketing is all about context. The more you know
about the context of your visitor, the more relevant you can make the
experience.
• But how do you make this happen?
Source : Sitecore

17. Website visitor - Personalisation
• The moment a person visits your website, you get an abundance of information, even
without them leaving an email address or reaching out. You know the visitor’s geolocation,
the device type, browser, language, the channel they visit from and more. While they
browse the site they leave more traces: the pages they looked at, the content they
consumed and specific actions they triggered. On top of that we could even load 3rd party
data based on the location, for instance, weather information.
Show information about a location near that person
Providing relevant content to your visitors immediately
increases the possibility of them doing business with you. You
help them navigate your site more easily and guide them
through the different stages of the customer journey.
DEFINE YOUR AUDIENCE AND START PROFILING
Start with the largest audience that has the highest
potential value and that’s easiest to identify
Define profiles to track users as they navigate through
your site
Sitecore Experience Platform allows you to define these
profiles easily
User actions indicate engagement on your website
Configure these goals and engagement values in the Sitecore
Experience Platform

18. Personalisation is the method for displaying targeted, relevant
content to your contacts based on their characteristics and
behavior, such as location, gender, or previous visits.
The Rule Set Editor uses these logic-based rules to determine
whether a contact or a segment meets a condition and changes
the content accordingly.
With personalisation, you can ensure that the right
content reaches the right contacts, for example, by
showing, hiding, or adjusting content.
Among other things, you can use personalization to:
•Show different content to contacts based on their
geographic location.
•Hide a registration form from contacts who have
previously filled out the form.
•Change the text in a website banner based on a
contact's referring site.

19. Three different personalisation categories:
• Rule based personalisation
o Changing call to actions and after a specific goal is triggered
o Showing different content to new vs returning visitors
o Adapt the mobile experience by hiding or showing content
based on device type
• Implicit personalisation (based on what visitors are doing on your
site)
• Serve content relevant to their stage in the customer
journey, their interests and intent
• Explicit personalisation (based on specific user data)
• Using actual data that you gathered from your visitors,
Sitecore CMS allows you to save that data to the users’ profile
and to use that data for personalisation

20. Content personalisation based on profile
• Profile
o Profile keys: Profile keys are attributes that are applied
to your personas – think of audience segments or
content categories.
Profile cards (Personas): Profile cards are groups of
profile keys (attributes) that are used to assign
values to content items or components.
Pattern cards: Pattern cards are used to map
profile values to your website visitors. These
cards are used to profile your audience and
make assumptions about who specific types of
visitors are and what you want them to see.

21. Massively multivariate CRO made
possible by AI

22. Sentient - Ascend

23. EVOLUTIONARY ALGORITHMS
• HARNESS THE POWER OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
• Ascend leverages evolutionary algorithms and Bayesian statistics to evolve
winning website designs. It identifies promising concepts, combines them
with each other, and rapidly repeats the process to evolve the designs that
convert best.

24. MASSIVELY MULTIVARIATE
• Unlike traditional A/B testing solutions, Ascend
lets you test all your ideas at once, actively
finding top performing concepts and
combining them into winning site experiences.
It compresses years worth of testing into a
month by combining high-level AI with your
team's creativity.
FULL-FUNNEL OPTIMIZATION
TEST ENTIRE JOURNEYS IN A SINGLE EXPERIMENT
Individual pages in your sales and lead generation
funnel can influence each other and Ascend,
uniquely, allows you to test tons of ideas across
multiple pages. That means you can evaluate an
entire journey in a single experiment as opposed to
multiple individual tests

25. A/B Testing Evolution for Optimisation : The Move towards AI
Source : Fusion

26. AI powered Customer Service
Chatbots & Virtual Assistant to
assist customers throughout the
“Customer journey”

27. Some bots servicing Travel Industry

28. Latest Air France Chatbots

29. Nina the Travel concierge by Caravelo
Turn messenger platforms into a channel for sales and servicing
NINA enables a personalized and ‘always available’ direct relationship with your
passengers with the use of Chatbot technology
FEATURES, UTILITY, DEPLOYMENT
• NLU based flight search with in-chat payment
• Answer questions with contextual responses
• Multiple language capability
• Connected to multiple messenger platforms
• Fully white-label solution: your brand assimilated in every interaction
• Seamless integration with airline PSS and other systems
Source : Caravello

30. KLM -Chatbot Facebook Messenger plugins / API
Nexmo Chat App API integrates
with Salesforce CRM
booking confirmation 24 hour check in reminder Boarding Pass Delay Notification
Source : AF/KLM

33. Views about Virtual Assistants

34. DigitalGenius
• Automatically Fill Case Data &
Suggest Answers
• We believe agents should spend
time offering a personalized
customer experience instead of
doing menial, repetitive tasks.
That's why we train our AI to
predict case meta-data & suggest
or automate answers. This saves
valuable time and improves
accuracy every time you receive a
new message.

35. DigitalGenius CoPilot - Here’s How It Works
• AI Model Training
• Predictive Case Intelligence
• When a message comes in, the
model will then predict the relevant
meta-data about the case, such as
tags and other case details. This
Predictive Case Intelligence can also
route cases to the most appropriate
team members.
• Human+AI Question Answering
• AI-powered decisions are made as a
new message arrives via Email,
Social Media, Mobile Messaging or
Live Chat. CoPilot will suggest the
best answer to the agent.

36. Voice Assistant

39. Source : AF/KLM

40. Engage with your customers
• Email is still an enormously important and powerful channel for us, but I
wouldn’t consider it the optimal channel for many customers.
• Push messaging and SMS can be particularly effective, but they’re also
very sensitive channels. There’s only a certain amount of tolerance that any
customer has for relevance and for offer cadence, right?
“Offer me things that are relevant to me and not too often.” We have found
that those sensitivities — and rightly so — go up significantly when talking
about other channels like SMS and push.

41. ACHIEVING TRUE PERSONALISATION
SINGLE TOUCHPOINT AND PAY & SPRAY
• Customer data scattered
• Generic marketing campaigns
• Organisation centric and siloed customer contact
DATA MANAGEMENT PLATFORM / CUSTOMER DATA PLATFORM
• Cross channel use cases
• 360 customer profile & audiences
• Recommendations
JOURNEY ORCHESTRATION
• Customer journey management
• Full ecosystem integration
ARTIFICAL INTELLIGENCE
• Automated real-time decision making
• Complete raw data pool available
• True automated 1:1 personalisation
ACHIEVING TRUE PERSONALISATION WITH INTELLIGENT JOURNEY ORCHESTRATION
41Source : Relay42
Single
touchpoint
Across
touchpoints
Journey
Orchestration
1-all
1-many
1:1
DMP CDP
Customer centricity
True personalisation

42. INTELLIGENT JOURNEY ORCHESTRATION
42
Single customer view
Customer systems
UNIFY
DATA
Digital channels
Journey
orchestration
Dynamic
content
ENGAGE IN
JOURNEYS
Paid channels
Owned channels
Artificial Intelligence
PREDICT
BEHAVIOUR
2nd party data 3rd party data
Source : Relay42

43. INTEGRATE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Create models,
structured from travel
industry experience but
tailored by learning
from your customer
data
Use Deep Learning
algorithms with
Recurrent Neural
Networks
43
Applied at an individual
level, in real-time,
available for immediate
activation within the
Relay42 platform
Source : Relay42

44. TRAVEL INDUSTRY SPECIFIC A.I. MODELS
LIKELINESS TO CONVERT
"Will convert with X% change
in X number of days"
SEARCH RECOMMENDATIONS
"Other people also showed
certain behavior OR
converted"
BEHAVIORAL CLUSTERING
“New or existing customers
showing repetitive behavior over
X days into the future"
UPSELL RECOMMENDATIONS
"What upsell combination has
the highest conversion
potential"
NEXT BEST PRODUCT
"What next product should
we offer including re-
activation"
PSYCHOGRAPHIC MODELS
“Target attitude X based
customers with dynamic
message Y”
EXAMPLE OF A.I. MODELS USED WITHIN YOUR INDUSTRY
Source : Relay42

45. AI is reinventing existing products and
powering new experiences

46. Smart Segmentation
•With Machine Learning
• Reach and better engage with our target audience

47. Some Examples of
Applications

48. Emarsys
Identifying the best channels
• How should you contact the
customer? Using engagement
probability, understand the
likelihood that each contact
responds to individual
channels, so you can optimize
your channel spend by
engaging with contacts
through their preferred
method of communication.

49. A personalized email will typically:
•Use the customer’s name.
•Contain a CTA to join your VIP or loyalty program.
•Contain offers most likely to entice the individual.
•Contain cross- and up-sell ads for additional add-ons or for partners like car rental and hotel options.
Emarsys data suggests that roughly 16% of total airline revenue comes from additional cross-sell or
upsells.
•Present personalized recommendations and live pricing and availability.
Personalised Email

50. Optimize message timing for the best chance
of engagement
When is the right time to
contact the customer? AI
identifies what day and time to
send a message when each
individual recipient is at their
most responsive.

51. Automatically tailor content in real time
• Effortlessly include the most engaging content in your email,
populated at the exact moment it is opened. Combine website, social,
and product data with customer behavior history for rich and relevant
contextualization capabilities.

52. KLM: PERSONALISATION WITH AI
Challenge
• Develop smarter, more effective media buying models
through data
• Serve relevant display advertising
Solution
• Combined website and app interactions with customer data
from email, social CRM, call center and affiliates. Data was
synced in Google Analytics 360.
• Developed predictive model which served in real-time the most-
relevant ad to every individual.
About the customer
KLM Royal Dutch Airlines is the flag carrier airline of the Netherlands,
part of Air France-KLM group. KLM has over 35,000 employees and
serves to 145 destinations.
Lower cost
per booking
40%
More bookings
at same spend
2x
Higher click-
through rate
1.4 x
USING RELAY42 & GOOGLE TO BE SMARTER AND MORE PERSONAL
Source : Relay42

53. Boxever - Drive higher engagement and conversion
• Predictive Segments to better target your email campaigns
for increased conversions (refresh every 24 hrs)
• Targeted messages that actually impact behavior
• 100 of options for responsive personalization
• Identify every customer on your website
• follow their journey along the way, from landing page
through conversion and beyond, to return visits
• Build out a rich guest profile
• Combining fragments of data from separate
sources by accurately modeling omnichannel
customer transactions and behaviors
Source : Boxever

54. Case Study :
Source : EXLRT

55. The “Age of the Customer” in airlines
with Salesforce Einstein: AI for the World's Smartest CRM
Japan Airlines aligns employees to improve service in the skies
DELTA AIR LINES
“We ask questions and get answers in real time.”
Airbus is leveraging the predictive capabilities of Salesforce
Einstein to “make predictions and recommendations that
optimize the customer experience”.
Virgin America Taking the guest experience to a whole new level
• Optimising B2B sales efficiency
 create a single customer view across organisational silos,
provide tools for analytics, bring CPQ optimisation and
automate the processes.
• Creating personalised, seamless journeys
 provide more meaningful connections with the passengers across all
touch points.
• Rapidly digitising processes
 Many airlines are utilising apps to rapidly digitise passenger-facing
processes, such as compensation, and internal ones, like the Turn-
Around process.
KLM
“With the help of Salesforce, our 24/7 customer service department
uses social media as an end-to-end source for solving any queries.
Source : Salesforce

56. TRANSFORMING THE TRAVEL EXPERIENCE
FROM STATUS QUO TO EXCEPTIONAL
Status Quo: Heavy search involved on traveler’s part, and the
process is very manual. Travelers must find a travel agent, an airline,
or a discount site to find the right flights, prices, and activities.
Exceptional: Travel companies sending personalised content based
on interests, past travel, and budget, with real-time flight pricing and
availability before a traveler even realizes they want to travel.
Status Quo: Automatic seat assignment, one-size-fits-all emails with basic travel information
unspecific to a traveler’s trip outside of flight and destination.
Exceptional: Dynamic communications that personalize confirmations with real-time countdown to
check-in information, available seat upgrades, and upcoming weather for the trip.

57. TRANSFORMING THE TRAVEL EXPERIENCE
FROM STATUS QUO TO EXCEPTIONAL (Contd.)
Status Quo: Relying on multiple sources for reminders, reservations,
itineraries, weather forecasts, and other travel-related information.
Exceptional: Travelers can rely on one source; all information can be
provided in a dynamic email or mobile app.
Status Quo: Static information: email and notifications include flight number, departure details,
and confirmation number.
Exceptional: Notifications leading up to the trip come to preferred device, and include real-time
updates on flight status, currency exchange rates, hotel prices, available seat upgrades,
destination weather forecast, and more. Communications can also include invitations to join
loyalty
programs and newsletters specific to a traveler’s interests.

58. TRANSFORMING THE TRAVEL EXPERIENCE
FROM STATUS QUO TO EXCEPTIONAL
Status Quo: Hotel and activity bookings done before the trip even took
place. Travelers spent time researching and planning activities for their
trip before they departed.
Exceptional: As travelers open confirmation emails, they see available
hotel prices, weather, activities, and more, based on their destination and
current location during travel, allowing them to make decisions in the
moment.
Status Quo: Travelers had to manage a bevy of emails, text reminders, and push notifications
from multiple apps for information on their trip.
Exceptional: One email or app that contains all the information travelers need during a trip. Open
time content means the content adapts to where the traveler is, how close they are to their trip,
and their preferences for their itinerary.

59. TRANSFORMING THE TRAVEL EXPERIENCE
FROM STATUS QUO TO EXCEPTIONAL (Contd.)
Status Quo: After trips, travelers are pushed into a ‘segment’ for one-
size-fits-all campaigns, and receive emails and incentives for all-
encompassing sales, travel destinations, and hotels, regardless of their
preferences.
Exceptional: Determine the optimal time to contact a customer after the
trip, and follow up with personalised content, upcoming flight specials, or
recommended trips that fit the customer’s profile; proof that this travel
provider understands travel habits, needs, and wants.
Status Quo: Travelers enrolled in rewards programs receive the same incentives across the board.
Spend a dollar, or travel a mile, and get standardized points toward your next flight, regardless of
frequency, spend, or interests with the travel company.
Exceptional: Incentive programs should reflect not only the preferences of the traveler, but their
importance to your business. A traveler who uses your company once doesn’t have the same value
as one who chooses your company regularly, and their incentives should reflect that.

60. Dynamic Pricing & Personalisation
Source : PROS

61. Source : Amadeus

62. Personalised Push Notifications – AI powered
• Artificial Intelligence powered push
notifications to truly engage audiences
at a 1:1 level.
• Every aspect of a customer’s
engagement including factors like their
device type and previous interactions
with your brand’s push notifications
are taken into consideration to build
them right.
Source : SITA

63. Pepper -A humanoid robot with artificial
intelligence at Munich Airport
Pepper welcome passengers and answer their
questions about shops, restaurants and flight
operations.
Young Daniel asks Josie Pepper the way to the nearest play
area. The lady robot answers without hesitation
IBM Watson Internet of Things (IoT) cloud-based,
artificial intelligence technologies are behind Josie
Pepper’s capabilities.

64. Key Take Away
• With Artificial Intelligence (Chatbots, NLP, Predictive Analytics)
Know your customers to make smarter / personalised offers
Create Real time 1:1 personalised experience across channels
Increase Conversions & cross selling opportunities
Realise additional revenue opportunities
Turn more customers into loyal advocates

65. New generation of customers – Tech savvy /
always connected
• In five years, this level of personalisation will be the new normal,
especially for younger generations, who are used to relying on
technology to solve many of their problems – wherever, whenever and
however they want.

66. Next wave of AI and personalisation
•The next wave of AI and personalisation will
act as an even more powerful toolkit that
delivers multidimensional customer
experiences, potentially through image and
speech recognition and chat bots.

67. Youvraj Seeam
yseeam@airmauritius.com
youvraj-seeam
@yseeam
THANK YOU