As part of its commitment to offer transparent communications and a better customer experience for all guests, low-cost carrier AirAsia has fired its AirAsia Virtual Allstar (AVA) which has been serving customers online since 2019. She will be replaced with a newer chatbox that claims to be more advanced with enhanced artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities.
Capital A CEO Tony Fernandes said “Our guests have spoken, and we are listening and learning. We felt their frustration towards our first AI chatbot – AVA which was always a work in progress. We recognise she fell short of people’s expectations and we want to do better. We thank AVA for her achievements in handling more than 113 million guests since 2019, and handling over 43 million queries in 2020 at the peak of Covid. Given the size of the airline that AirAsia is, with thousands of refunds and flight change requests, humans alone cannot cope, we have to also use technology. We learned through AVA how to use artificial intelligence to answer complex and sizable queries better and faster. Over the last eight months, the customer experience team have zeroed in on what our guests need and want, what their top complaints are, and today we are happy to introduce Ask Bo, named after our airline Group CEO Bo Lingam. He has been at my side for the past 21 years and is the go-to person with all answers to our Group’s airline questions.”
“Our guests have spoken, and we are listening and learning. We felt their frustration towards our first AI chat bot – AVA which was always a work in progress. We recognise she fell short of people’s expectations and we want to do better.” – Tony Fernandes, CEO of Capital A. pic.twitter.com/imdcrAxJ7O
— airasia (@airasia) February 8, 2023
AirAsia Aviation Group CEO Bo Lingam said he’s happy to put his name and face for their new enhanced version of their customer concierge service which promises to be more proactive and attentive. He said lower fares don’t mean lower service quality and it is important to make their guests feel cared for when they choose to fly AirAsia for the best fares and the best customer service.
Some of the new features of “Ask Bo” is the ability to provide live updates on flight status and changes (including delays and departure), as well as boarding information. Ask Bo can support more languages which include English, Chinese, Bahasa Melayu, Bahasa Indonesia, Thai, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese.
Unlike AVA, Ask Bo aims to be more proactive by pushing notifications on any last-minute changes on the day of operations, providing baggage information such as tracking, arrival belt and mishandled baggage report, as well as reporting real-time automatic updates of departure timings into the electronic Boarding Pass for greater peace of mind.
Ask Bo aims to provide guests with greater autonomy such as the ability to change flights, request refunds and choose service recovery options. By March, guests will be able to talk live to human agents during the Ask Bo interaction. AirAsia said it will continue to innovate to ensure the highest standards of customer care in all they do to best meet its guest’s requirements.
For greater transparency, Capital A said they will reveal live information on On-time performance as well as baggage handling information on both its website and Super App. It vowed to also review guests’ feedback from various perspectives and to support cross-departmental collaboration and adoption of customer experience programmes.
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