ARMONK,
N.Y. and EHNINGEN, Germany, Oct. 29, 2019 /PRNewswire/
-- IBM (NYSE: IBM) and the Lufthansa Group have joined forces
to establish the Lufthansa AI Studio, a collaboration that
will use artificial intelligence (AI) to help address the airline's
business challenges, such as improving customer service.
Leveraging the IBM Garage method, the Lufthansa AI Studio's
interdisciplinary team consists of IBM Services professionals with
diverse expertise working side by side with Lufthansa
employees to quickly test new AI-based business ideas and
services suitability, implement them in pilot projects, and roll
them out within the company.
Focusing on better customer service with the AI
Studio
The AI Studio is simultaneously working on more than ten
different solutions for various departments within Lufthansa Group
with a focus on applications for sales, customer service and
operational areas.
One of the first projects of the Lufthansa AI Studio was to
integrate IBM Watson solutions, including Watson Conversation and
Watson Natural Language Understanding, in the Service Help Centre
(SHC). The 22 employees of the SHC support 15,000 Lufthansa agents
at 180 Lufthansa stations worldwide in answering service questions
involving check-in and boarding processes, which can add up to more
than 100,000 support calls per year. By integrating IBM Watson AI
services, previously disparate data sources can now be searched for
possible approaches and answers to customer queries. The SHC
employees can phrase their questions in natural language, and the
solution is also trained to 'understand' specialized aviation and
internal company terms to enhance results. IBM Watson manages,
searches through, analyzes and interprets the various relevant
information sources, such as SharePoint and internal ticket
systems. In addition to shorter waiting times of the customers at
the check-in, the quality of the information provided as a whole
was increased.
Follow-up projects to help address greater agility and
innovation
Following the success of these initial solutions, the AI Studio
continues to process new queries and projects from departments
across the airline aimed at modernizing processes and transforming
workflows. Currently, IBM and Lufthansa teams are working together
to develop solutions to support further help-desk use cases,
including AI technology applied to the end-customer call centre.
For example, the AI Studio team is developing a new use case aimed
at improving the Lufthansa Customer Feedback Management coming
through multiple channels. The corresponding data are analyzed by
means of a combination of various IBM AI cloud services and made
available to the employees in intelligently edited form using
natural language processing, sentiment analysis or interaction with
a chatbot. One example of this is the AI-supported sentiment
analysis of social media messages on various channels of the
Lufthansa Group.
By combining the right expertise, applied technology and new
ways of working in one collaborative space under the motto 'Think
Big - Start Small - Fail Quickly - Scale Fast,' all use cases and innovation ideas
are thought through, promoted and implemented in the AI Studio
according to the IBM Garage concept as part of an agile project
approach.
"As airlines look to optimize operations and enhance customer
experiences, we're seeing a continued progression of
technology deployment to create solutions that deliver a powerful
combination of data and technology. Airlines, like Lufthansa, are
applying AI to sift through vast amounts of customer data to solve
problems and more quickly respond to their passengers' needs," said
Dee Waddell, Global Managing
Director, Travel & Transportation, IBM. "Through the IBM
Garage, a unique co-creation experience, IBM experts and Lufthansa
employees are working together to develop AI solutions that can
rapidly move from a new idea to adoption across the airline,
putting data driven insights at the fingertips of employees to help
better serve customers. The Lufthansa AI Studio demonstrates the
airline's continued commitment to driving innovation and creating
exceptional customer experiences."
"In the aviation industry, we're
in a highly competitive environment," says Mirco Bharpalania, Senior
Director Data, Analytics, Business Intelligence and Middleware at
Lufthansa Group. "Our premium
strategy and our service promise to our customers set us apart from
the competition in a positive way. We're convinced that the use of
modern technology allows us, for one, to even further enhance our
customers' experience and, second, to put our employees in the
position to always be able to make the right decisions, as they
have easy access to the information they need, at the right time
and in the right form. We recognised early that AI solutions give
us an advantage in the continuing development of our service and
business models. For that reason, we founded the Lufthansa AI
Studio jointly with IBM. The success of the first AI projects shows
that the very close and agile collaboration with our partner can
result in true innovation that decisively assists us in our ongoing
strategic development."
The contract was signed in the first quarter 2019.
About IBM:
For more information about IBM Services,
visit https://www.ibm.com/services.
For more information about IBM Watson, visit
https://www.ibm.com/watson
Media Contacts:
Marisa
Conway
IBM Media Relations
conwaym@us.ibm.com
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SOURCE IBM