GOL Airlines
The travel industry is highly competitive, and airlines have had to step up their game to improve their customer experience and strengthen brand loyalty. Brazilian airline GOL needed to relieve pressure on their call center, improve customer satisfaction and handle the volume of queries their agents were receiving. They turned to Inbenta to help them reimagine their customer service with the power of AI.
Overview
GOL operates 900 flights a day.
Around 2.5 million travellers ask questions through the GOL website each month.
Who: GOL is a Brazilian airline in operation since 2001. One of the fastest-growing airlines in the world, they operate 900 fights daily and serve the most passengers in Brazil. Never shy about using technology to improve their customer experience, they were pioneers in launching the first mobile check-in service, providing mobile geolocation to their passengers and designing an accessible website to assist people with visual and motor impairments.
What: GOL’s website has heavy traffic: around 2.5 million travellers ask questions through the site each month, from check-in help to ticket purchasing to luggage restrictions. The airline initially used conventional channels (in person, email, phone) to handle these requests. GOL needed to reduce the waiting time in their contact center and improve the customer experience. They wanted to automate how simple or repetitive questions are answered, common queries whose answers are on their website but that customers have trouble finding.
Why Inbenta: GOL believed a chatbot could manage these common questions. This would let agents focus on more challenging queries, where a human interaction is critical to resolving the issue.
Our bot today makes our customers’ lives much easier.”
Challenge
- Reduce waiting time in their contact center
- Improve customer experience by automating simple questions
- Give agents more time to answer complex queries
Solution
GOL turned to Inbenta to revolutionize their customer service and answer questions before they became a problem.
Inbenta recognized that addressing support requests through GOL’s various channels was putting significant pressure on staff and resources. The solution: Gal, an AI-powered chatbot that let customers find answers quickly and easily.
Introducing Gal
To address these issues, Inbenta went to work, developing a customer service chatbot called Gal for the GOL website.
Gal uses Inbenta’s AI-powered CX platform to give GOL customers 24/7 support. Today, Gal handles approximately a third of all the questions GOL receives and has an impressive retention rate of 85%.
Customer satisfaction has improved dramatically and Gal keeps learning and improving daily, freeing time for agents to focus on more complex queries.
In 2020, GOL’s AI-powered chatbot Gal handled
- 895,000 customer queries
- 90% of interactions autonomously
- 1/3 of all customer questions
WhatsApp Integration
With the success of Gal on the airline’s website, GOL integrated their chatbot on WhatsApp — a popular channel for customers in Brazil to contact a human agent. Its functionalities included:
- Online check-in
- Booking management
- Flight status and time information
- Baggage information
- Special assistance
- Seat selection
Today, approximately 35% of customers finalize their check-in process through WhatsApp, which is a very good result for us. Among those customers, 90% say that it’s very good or excellent service, and we’re obviously very happy with that result.
Gal on WhatsApp
- 35% of customers finalize check-in through WhatsApp
- 90% of customers describe the service as very good or excellen
Results
Deploying Gal on WhatsApp, as well as at check-in and elsewhere, has helped thousands of customers get the information they need quickly and efficiently. With this new tool, passengers can answer questions, manage their reservation, cancel or rebook flights and more. For customers who can’t reach the airline’s call center or are departing soon and need answers fast, Gal has been a lifesaver.
GOL continues to investigate new technologies, such as voice solutions, and plans to give their customers the power to do even more on their own, no matter the channel.
Inbenta’s chatbot solution has been a win-win for both GOL Airlines and its customer
Inbenta has led to great improvements to our customer service, with a very significant cost reduction for our company. Currently, for example, more than 30% of emails are managed directly by [the chatbot].
Inbenta Benefits
- Lower your cost, increase your ROI
- Keep up with customer preferences
- Improve your customer experience
- Achieve higher retention rates, more loyal customers and a higher customer lifetime value
Working with Inbenta
Thanks to Inbenta’s solution, we are able to update the information we deliver to our customers in a quick and easy way, making our customers’ lives easier. The solution is very user-friendly and our team can go in and update content in a matter of minutes without having to rely on Inbenta for help.
The relationship with Inbenta is really good, and we get a lot of support from the team there. We have weekly meetings during which Inbenta’s customer support gives us recommendations on how we could improve our content. They also bring innovative ideas, which is very helpful.
The dashboards give us a lot of information. They allow us to identify errors or issues on our website and let us notify other teams about them, or to challenge them on how we could do things better.
