Expertflow

Voice portals for Airlines

Usually, a voice portal can provide the same functionality as a WWW site with the difference that it’s available over normal phone instead of requiring an internet connection.

The way a voice portal interacts with the back-office servers (flight status systems etc) is exactly the same as a WWW server. Hence, what the airline has already installed for their website can be leveraged to a large extent for the purpose of voice portal.

Content that is currently available on the airline’s website will be made available on the voice portal. Since the website uses drop-down lists for example to determine City/ Airport names, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is recommended to make the navigation simpler for the caller. Selection of cities without ASR would become very cumbersome from a caller perspective.

In many cases, airlines provide the following services to their customer via the voice self service portal:

• Flight booking (the handling of the payment will have to be handled by a secure VXML payment processer of a payment partner)
• Flight schedule
• Flight status
• AWB tracking

A voice portal is a natural complement to a callcenter. It is even more cost-effective than a callcenter. It is available to the caller even if all agents are fully busy, and can help curb inflowing call traffic by absorbing the most frequent type of queries. In some cases, parts of the interaction are handled by the voice portal, and certain others by the callcenter agent, making these systems working hand in hand with each other.