customer story
How TUI powered seasonal outbound campaigns with conversational AI
TUI Poland is part of TUI Group, which is a leading travel service provider operating worldwide. In addition to being the largest leisure, travel and tourism company in the world, TUI also owns travel agencies, hotels, cruise ships and several European airlines. TUI AG is jointly listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and the London Stock Exchange as a constituent of the FTSE 250 Index.
Project goals
Scalable outbound call capacity supported by virtual agents
There were three major goals for the Talkie.ai virtual agent voicebots implemented by TUI Poland:
- Handle high volumes of outbound sales calls during peak outbound campaign periods
- Help reduce reliance on outsourced call center services in peak campaign periods
- Explore conversational AI as a way to automate repetitive high volume business processes
“Talkie.ai voicebots were able to handle a surprising number of after sales calls from start to finish. Implementing the Talkie.ai solution has allowed us to augment our contact center capacity during peak campaign periods and reduced our reliance on more expensive outsourced service providers. We are now looking into other inbound and outbound processes in our business that could benefit from voice automation.”
Sylwia Jankowska-Mikułowicz – Head of Customer Service
Conversational AI solutions for outbound campaigns
For TUI Poland, sales campaign periods generate an overwhelming amount of after sales follow up calls. TUI Poland wanted to be able to scale up and scale down their contact center capabilities for campaign periods in response to seasonal fluctuations. Conversational AI powered voicebots offered TUI Poland a way to augment their core team of special human agent travel consultants to help handle the extra volume of calls during their campaign period while still offering great customer experiences.
Automating outbound campaign calls
As part of their campaign, TUI Poland needed to call customers to notify them of payment deadlines and discount options. The TUI team wanted to automate as much as possible the following processes:
- Contact customers before payment deadlines were reached where discounts were still applicable
- Confirm customer intent to proceed with bookings
- Allow customers to cancel bookings if they no longer planned to proceed with them
Background of AI voicebot implementation
TUI Poland began by analysing their back office processes to identify which ones could be easily automated. They also evaluated what information needed to be integrated into their customer relationship management (CRM) database. In consultation with their entire customer service team, they identified multiple processes that could be automated with voicebots and the teams were very positive about having highly repetitive processes automated by the voicebots.
The main challenge at the start of the process was in planning the integration of automated calls with the CRM to ensure all important information was captured accurately, making the travel consultant’s work easier. The voicebot would handle after sales follow up calls, capture essential information into the CRM and allow the human agents to access that information to follow up on more complex customer cases.
“Travel consultants were freed from highly repetitive tasks and could see the results of the voicebot call activity instantly in the CRM.”
Voicebot performance in outbound campaigns
13,000+ total outbound calls made by the voicebot
7000 calls made by the voicebot to be able to connect with over 3000 unique customers during peak campaign periods
Over 50% of successfully connected calls were handled entirely by the voicebot during the peak of the campaign
A key voicebot performance metric for TUI Poland was not just the volume of calls the voicebot could conduct but also the effectiveness of the calls.
One of the key tasks handled by the voicebot was to confirm payments with customers. TUI Poland was excited to see that 30% of payments were confirmed on the first call. The other key process handled by the voicebot was to inquire about outstanding payments. In this case, the voicebot was 50% successful in the first call. The voicebot enabled TUI Poland to process payments quickly and automatically update records in their CRM.
Using voicebots to conduct these processes offered huge time savings for TUI Poland’s travel consultants. Previously, the travel consultants would need to make several calls spread across multiple days to contact customers, accumulating many unsuccessful call attempts to reach customers. Travel consultants were freed from highly repetitive tasks and could see the results of the voicebot call activity instantly in the CRM.
Keys to successful implementation
TUI Poland related that the key to implementing a hybrid model for automation relies on strong, consultative leadership that ensured that there were no concerns around job replacement from the teams. Overall, it took about one year to manage the complete transition to the hybrid model. Their team is now investigating other business processes that have the potential to be automated with conversational AI. The ease of use of the Talkie.ai platform has also prompted TUI Poland to develop in-house capabilities to design and train voicebots for future applications within the company.
The conversational AI helps ensure that customers have a positive experience through human-like conversations with the voicebots. The voicebots are also efficient at capturing important information about the customer into sales databases that human agents can review later. This hybrid approach allows voicebots to augment call capacity rather than replace the work of skilled human agents.
Benefits of Talkie.ai
Implement Talkie.ai to get benefits of voice AI for great customer experiences in outbound campaigns
- Handle higher volumes of outbound sales calls without increasing the core customer team headcount
- Scale up and scale down contact center capability and costs predictably in and out of seasonal campaign periods
- Reach more customers in a timely manner to allow them to benefit from time-sensitive outbound campaign offers