A person sitting at a desk wearing a headset A person sitting at a desk wearing a headset

Tiger Analytics elevates airline customer service with Azure AI

Equipped with technical expertise, a meticulous approach, and Microsoft AI solutions, Tiger Analytics is helping organizations harness the power of cutting-edge technology.

April 25, 2024

As a global leader in AI and analytics services and solutions, Tiger Analytics has been helping organizations turn enterprise data into intelligent action since 2011. But technical knowledge is only half of the equation for the company.

The other half is empowering their customers to embrace innovation and drive growth. As a Microsoft partner, Tiger Analytics uses their expertise in Microsoft solutions to help customers stay ahead in a competitive market.

Their partnership with Microsoft also introduced them to Inspiro—a global customer experience outsourcing organization that supports each stage of the customer lifecycle with strategy, consulting, management, and digital solutions. Working together, they made a big impact on customer support operations for a leading airline.

A tedious search process

In the airline industry, sky-high customer expectations need to be met with reliable, accurate, and swift support. Inspiro provides both voice and non-voice call assistance for customers of a major airline based in the Philippines. On any given day, their contact center agents help with everything from booking flights and processing refunds to assisting passengers with special handling needs.

Inspiro previously worked with the airline to develop a knowledge base tool that organized and consolidated information—and with that tool, agents could search the knowledge base using specific keywords. If a customer had a question about baggage allowance for their flight, the agent could use "baggage" as a keyword. In turn, the search tool would then provide a list of every document in the knowledge base with "baggage" in the file name.

"These documents can be pretty technical, but the agent has no choice but to read through them and find the correct information as quickly as possible," said Christian Fajardo, Vice President of Operations at Inspiro.

With a high call volume and an extensive amount of documentation—almost 1,000 PDF files—to search through, the agents were spending an average of two to three minutes trying to find the answers to customer questions. "[First], the agent has to have the experience to know which document they have to read through—which can include six to eight documents," said Raam Govind, Engagement Manager at Tiger Analytics. "Then they have to put the customer on hold, read through the right document, and respond to the customer."

Though the knowledge base was full of information, the initial tool was built for more basic search functions—which impacted the accuracy of responses. "In the past, our main goal was to obtain information, and efficiency was not a major concern. Simply being able to access information was considered a great success," Fajardo said. "However, if the search term was not included in any of the available materials, the tool was not able to provide any useful information."

To provide a better experience for the airline's agents and customers, Inspiro needed a more robust tool to drive both efficiency and accuracy for the support and reservation process.

Three people sitting around a table and talking

"[The search tool] will only retrieve information from a trusted and reliable source instead of searching the internet."

—Christian Fajardo, Vice President of Operations, Inspiro

An intelligent tool, powered by Microsoft AI

Inspiro turned to Tiger Analytics to develop, implement, and operationalize a generative AI-powered solution that could help agents quickly navigate documentation and respond to inquiries. Whereas the existing search tool lacked support for natural language queries, full content searches, and contextual search, Tiger Analytics set out to develop an OpenAI-enabled knowledge base search tool with all of those capabilities.

"The platform [needed to] be connected to [the] knowledge base to prevent the AI from generating irrelevant or incorrect information," Fajardo said. "This means it will only retrieve information from a trusted and reliable source instead of searching the internet."

Using a customized natural language processing (NLP) model, Tiger Analytics fine-tuned the tool to respond to the nuances of questions related to the airline customer experience. To develop and deploy the NLP model, Tiger Analytics relied on Microsoft AI—and their expertise as a Solutions Partner for Data & AI (Azure), Digital & App Innovation (Azure), and Infrastructure (Azure)—for a scalable, future-proof system.

What sets Tiger Analytics' solution apart from a traditional chatbot is its flexibility and precision. "[With] your regular chatbot, you have a pre-structured conversation flow: First you select this, then you select that. But [our solution] is more flexible—you can ask a question and get a response," said Aashit Singh, Senior Data Scientist at Tiger Analytics. "It will give you not only the right document link, but also the page number and the top 10 references used to generate that response. So, you can open the right document, scroll to the right page number, and quickly read the content if you need to."

A person at a desk looking at a laptop A person at a desk looking at a laptop

"Together, we're shaping a future where intelligent solutions redefine customer interactions and enhance the role of an agent to an advisor."

—Anupam Bhargava, Vice President of Asia Pacific, Tiger Analytics

Swift response times, soaring customer satisfaction

With the OpenAI-enabled knowledge base search tool, it now takes the airline's agents just three to five seconds—rather than minutes—to find the answers customers need. With a faster search, Inspiro's Average Handling Time improved by 30.5% for non-voice support agents and 10.8% for voice support agents. Additionally, response accuracy improved by 20%, while quality assurance scores for chat support and voice support increased by 12.3% and 5.4%, respectively.

Looking ahead, Tiger Analytics and Inspiro aim to extend the search tool's capabilities, including translation services for various languages. They're also exploring the possibility of the tool to pull from any data source within an organization—whether that's an on-premises file server or a cloud-based system. "We're trying to see how we can implement both flexible and structured conversations into one back-end solution that can be presented across different interfaces," Singh said.

Backed by a strong partnership with Microsoft, Tiger Analytics is equipped to continue driving innovation in the customer service space and beyond. "Across diverse industries, from airlines to healthcare and beyond, we're leveraging advanced AI solutions to elevate customer service standards," said Anupam Bhargava, Vice President of Asia Pacific at Tiger Analytics. "Joining forces with Microsoft, we are spearheading a new era of customer support powered by OpenAI and data-driven management principles. Together, we're shaping a future where intelligent solutions redefine customer interactions and enhance the role of an agent to an advisor."

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