How Air Canada is innovating customer service across lines of business (BIZ211)

Here is a detailed summary of the key takeaways from the video transcription in markdown format:

Air Canada's Journey to Transform Customer Experience with Amazon Connect

Emerging Trends and Challenges in Customer Experience

  • Customers are experiencing disconnected journeys, where there is no contextual information passed when escalating from self-service to agent assistance.
  • Agents often struggle with inefficient workflows, toggling between multiple backend systems to serve customers.
  • Supervisors and managers lack access to integrated data, making it difficult to monitor, measure, and improve business outcomes.
  • IT leaders face technology barriers, leading to slow innovation, high costs, and long implementation timelines.
  • Organizations are struggling to keep up with the increasing customer expectations for support.

The Importance of Self-Service and IVR

  • 46% of customers would rather go to the dentist than talk to a contact center.
  • 70% of customers prefer to self-serve, but when they need to escalate, the experience must be seamless.
  • IVR remains the most important connection between companies and customers, accounting for twice as many interactions as live agents.
  • Next-generation IVR systems can deliver a 5-fold improvement in customer satisfaction scores and substantially reduce the number of live agent calls.

How Amazon Connect Solves Customer Experience Challenges

  • Amazon Connect leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to enhance self-service experiences, increase containment, and empower agents.
  • Features like conversational analytics, real-time fraud authentication, and generative AI-powered agent assist and self-service deliver significant efficiencies and cost savings.
  • Amazon Q&A in Connect, a new generative AI assistant, can now be used for end-customer self-service experiences, creating more personalized and capable interactions.

Air Canada's Transformation Journey

Passenger Experience Transformation

  • Air Canada faced increasing call volumes, manual queue processing, and siloed legacy systems, leading to high wait times and customer frustration.
  • By adopting Amazon Connect, Air Canada was able to shift to a unified experience with embedded self-service options, improving key metrics:
    • 15% reduction in overall contact center volumes
    • 8% reduction in abandonment rates
    • 78% of informational calls handled within the IVR
    • 20-second reduction in average handle time
    • 190 FTE savings, equating to $4.7 million CAD

Cargo Experience Transformation

  • Air Canada Cargo's pre-modernization process was highly manual, with agents working from email inboxes and limited visibility into queues and wait times.
  • By integrating Salesforce Service Cloud and Amazon Connect, Air Canada Cargo achieved:
    • 5% reduction in abandonment rates
    • 120-second (2-minute) reduction in average handle time
    • 20% improvement in agent productivity
    • Fully automated quality assurance process, reducing time from 89 hours to real-time

Lessons Learned and Future Outlook

  • Extend timelines and carefully manage scope to ensure a successful and meaningful transformation.
  • Focus on the people aspect, engaging employees early and providing the necessary training and change management support.
  • Ensure a solid knowledge management foundation to support the AI-powered capabilities.
  • Leverage the full capabilities of the chosen platform, reading the contract to understand what features are available.
  • Continued focus on self-service and agent assist capabilities, leveraging generative AI to enhance the customer and agent experience.

Your Digital Journey deserves a great story.

Build one with us.

Cookies Icon

These cookies are used to collect information about how you interact with this website and allow us to remember you. We use this information to improve and customize your browsing experience, as well as for analytics.

If you decline, your information won’t be tracked when you visit this website. A single cookie will be used in your browser to remember your preference.

Talk to us