Enhancing Customer Service With the Best of AI and Human Empathy

This sponsored content was created in collaboration with a Skift partner.

In today’s travel landscape, digital interactions define customer experiences. The more tech-savvy travelers become, the higher their expectations rise for seamless, personalized, and immediate service. From booking inquiries to post-trip support, the demand for efficient and empathetic digital customer service is at an all-time high. 

The ability to provide exceptional digital service can differentiate industry leaders from their competitors. But facilitating that level of experience at scale is virtually impossible without the right support tools in place behind the scenes. SkiftX caught up with Jason Smith, senior executive vice president of travel and hospitality at global business services provider Teleperformance, to discuss how travel brands can use AI to empower and enhance their customer service teams.

Combining Tech and the Human Touch 

Tech-enabled, frictionless customer service experiences are table stakes today — any dip from that expected level of service creates frustration. To support customers at scale, travel brands need to introduce advanced tech tools like AI chatbots and machine learning models. But to truly delight travelers and deliver empathy at scale, companies need to combine the best of high-tech and high-touch customer service. 

While generative AI can effectively handle routine inquiries, more sensitive customer service issues require a personal touch with a live customer service expert.

“As AI continues to evolve to address simple questions, we’re left with more complex interactions that require a higher level of empathy and personalization,” Smith said.

Fostering loyalty and enhancing overall customer satisfaction is especially important during major travel disruptions. For example, safety concerns and production delays in recent years have led to a shortage of aircraft, forcing airlines to reduce the number of flights available this summer. This has compounded travel chaos, requiring airlines to quickly adjust their customer service staffing to assist affected passengers​. 

These disruptions highlight the need for flexible strategies that empower customer service teams to respond rapidly and sensitively to unexpected events, ensuring that travelers receive timely and caring assistance and personalized support. 

“That might mean using AI to contextualize customer interactions across your website, their purchase history, and previous calls or chats,” Smith said. “Based on an understanding of what the customer needs, we can route them to the customer service expert best equipped to support them and recommend the next best course of action.”

In that sense, Teleperformance uses AI tools to create a more efficient and personalized customer journey and enhance the customer service expert’s experience at the same time. AI can automatically serve up the right offers for specific situations, like suggesting flights for rebooking a traveler or points bonuses to smooth over an inconvenience. That lets the customer service expert focus their full attention on the guest, and they get to shine as the one solving the problem. 

Streamlining Recruitment and Automating Workforce Management

When it comes to recruitment, AI can expedite the identification of top-performing and qualified customer service expert candidates. 

“We screen all of our candidates across a variety of attributes based upon the unique needs of each of our clients’ programs,” Smith said. “Then we leverage AI to look at historical top-performer data and make recommendations on what attribute scores align to the ideal candidate profile.”

As time passes and both the business and its end customers evolve, Teleperformance’s model for identifying top candidates adapts to keep pace. They automatically adjust their ideal candidate profile to stay aligned with current business needs every step of the way. 

Teleperformance also uses AI tools to power more efficient workforce modeling. 

“Even though you might not know exactly when large volumes of unexpected customer service call spikes are going to occur, we can intelligently route interactions to optimize available customer service experts and reduce wait times,” Smith said. 

With AI models built into its workforce management system and backed by a global workforce across 100 countries, Teleperformance can deploy resources the moment spikes happen, keeping wait times low when it matters most.

Facilitating Realistic Training Situations for Better Resolutions

As customer service experts move from recruitment to training, they can prepare by engaging in consequence-free role-playing scenarios. Teleperformance’s proprietary AI tools help them not only act out common customer conversations but also give feedback on the accuracy of their answers, the tone they use, and other critical aspects of the service they provide.

“It gives our experts-in-training unlimited times at bat,” Smith said. “They’re able to work with our AI tools until they can overcome that anxiety of speaking with a live customer. This reduces the time it takes for customer service experts to reach proficiency, allowing our clients to expand staffing and ramp up quickly to address peak seasonality or any other volume spikes they face.”

Because travel chaos can have severe consequences for customers, Teleperformance also uses AI tools to train customer service experts to distinguish between business-as-usual and all-hands-on-deck situations. AI tools help identify when major issues will drive additional call volume and move staff resources in real time to quickly handle more customers. 

“Our AI tools help customer service experts navigate those interactions as quickly as possible,” Smith said. “At the end of the day, the customer they’re working with at that moment is imperative.”

Accent Alignment: Improving Satisfaction Among Travelers and Customer Service Experts 

One of the most interesting ways Teleperformance applies AI tools is to align customer service experts’ accents with clear spoken English. This is accomplished by applying an algorithm to their voice in real time, thereby reducing friction in the conversation. Breaking down communication barriers improves understanding between customers and experts, which can be especially important when handling complex or sensitive issues.

Accent alignment also increases travel brands’ flexibility and nimbleness, because it allows them to scale customer service support instantly by tapping into a global workforce through offshoring and smartshoring options without sacrificing conversation quality. This, in turn, strengthens talent acquisition because it enables brands to hire capable candidates who customers might otherwise reject because of their accents.

Reducing that friction also supports sales initiatives by optimizing customers’ likelihood of making purchases. After implementing accent alignment in its customer care and sales programs with Teleperformance, Wyndham Hotels & Resorts saw a 26 percent conversion increase and a 23 percent reduction in call handle time.

“Accent alignment also removes the parts of the interaction that are dissatisfying for customer service experts,” Smith said. “Constantly getting asked to repeat yourself can negatively impact their confidence.”

Enhancing Empathetic Customer Care

By leveraging AI tools to address customer service challenges through this hybrid approach, Teleperformance enhances traveler experiences and drives the future of digital engagement in the travel industry. Airlines, hotels, online travel agencies, and travel companies around the world rely on Teleperformance’s comprehensive suite of travel and hospitality service solutions to address the unique challenges of the modern customer service landscape. 

“What really differentiates us is that we enhance the guest experience by bringing together empathetic human experts and advanced technology,” Smith said. “We foster an operational culture of innovation and excellence that delivers cost-effective, superior personalized services that delight customers and increase their loyalty to the travel brand.”

For more information about Teleperformance’s travel, hospitality, and cargo services, click here.

This content was created collaboratively by Teleperformance and Skift’s branded content studio, SkiftX.