Finnair and Ultimate take customer service to the skies

The Customer: The largest airline in Finland

The benefits to using artificial intelligence in your customer support go beyond automation rates. Artificial intelligence can guide agents through providing customers an enriched experience. That was Finnair's goal. As a premium brand, Finnair wanted an artificial intelligence solution that improved efficiency while elevating the high-class experience it delivers to its customers.

The Situation

Ultimate is an AI tool that boosts customer service quality and scale by recommending answers for agents in real time.

Ultimate was selected by Finnair because of its strong technical foundations and unparalleled ability to handle complex languages. The transparency, experience and agility of the team were also deciding factors.

Ultimate uses deep learning to intelligently cluster and classify millions of lines of unstructured conversations. In one day, the AI can integrate into a contact center and bring an business' customer service data to life, revealing common cases, best responses, frequency, urgency and processes.

As agents use the suggested responses, the AI continuously refines its accuracy, enabling the automation of common cases, and offering accurate answers to questions, saving agents time and boosting productivity and customer satisfaction.

The Solution: Building on the automation processes that were already in place

Thanks to Ultimate’s strong customer success support, Finnair was able to effectively navigate the Covid-19 crisis by:

• Providing Covid-19-related information in the very first place customers would turn to: their virtual agent’s welcoming message. Right away, customers could indicate whether their query concerned Covid-19 or not.

• Introducing a new support path for refunds with automated support in Finnish and English. In these first weeks, the automation rate reached 50% due to the increase in volumes directly related to Covid-19.

During their collaboration with Ultimate, Finnair also decided to change their CRM to Salesforce.

The Results

The AI was live in just 3 weeks. The AI trained on Finnair’s 1.5 million lines of unstructured historical chat conversation. Ongoing training, testing and improvement was conducted by Ultimate’s dedicated Customer Success team.

In the first five months, over half a million messages were sent to Finnair’s Chat customer service. Agents received suggested responses in real-time as messages came in, empowering them to give more on-brand answers, faster.

Usage of the tool grew month-on-month. The AI grew in accuracy through use. After five months, agents were using suggested responses as almost 30% of all of their answers.

Finnair achieved significant improvements in their customer service. Agents were freed from repetitive work and empowered to focus on what really matters: the customer.

Finnair Success

Finnair’s partnership with Ultimate has been a success. Finnair has significantly improved the speed and quality of their customer service, as well as the job satisfaction of their agents.

Finnair and Ultimate have a strong roadmap together. Additional languages have been deployed, including Swedish and English, and automation of high-volume requests is beginning.

Ultimate helped Finnair cut costs while significantly improving customer experience and boosting agent productivity.