TRAVEL ASSISTANT

KLM Royal Dutch Airlines

The industry standard for managing your entire travel process through voice.

Opportunity

Through innovation KLM continually aims to showcase it’s the service leadership in passenger aviation. The rise of Artificial Intelligence and voice driven assistants (Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, Apple’s Siri) has given new meaning to this belief. It opens up new ways to even better service the customer.

Leading up to the launch of the Google Home in the Dutch market in October 2018, KLM wanted to reiterate it’s position as the innovative service leader in their home market.

Idea

KLM Travel Assistant is a new, more intuitive, way for KLM customers to manage their entire pre-travel process: get inspired, book your ticket, pack your bag and leave in-time for your flight. An all-in-one seamless experience. This is how KLM makes the future of travel voice-driven.

KLM Travel Assistant consists of four voice-driven services:

Inspire

KLM suggests a suitable travel destination, by asking travelers a series of questions based on interests.

Book

Allows travelers to book a flight to any KLM destination.

Pack

The voice assistant helps travelers pack their bag, based on their travel destination and travel period, using variables like weather and location data.

Depart

Whether taking the car or public transport, the KLM Travel Assistant advises travelers when to leave their house on time to catch their flight, also taking into account the waiting time at the airport.

Objectives

Amongst other trends, the rise of A.I. and voice technology provides KLM with many opportunities to be of better service to their customers. With the launch of Google Home in The Netherlands, KLM set out to offer a consistent solution throughout the entire travel process. The objective was twofold:
1. Further develop and improve KLM’s A.I. service in order to add value for their customers throughout their entire customer journey through voice
2. Showcase that KLM is the most customer-centric and innovative aviation pioneer in their home market: The Netherlands


Target audience

The target audience for the four travel assistant functions are both tech-savvy travelers (who already uses the Google Assistant actively) as well as a broader audience of people who aren’t familiar with the latest technology. Travelers who are looking for a way to facilitate all the steps in their travel journey in the most intuitive way there is, using their voice.


Technology

The voice technology is completely built in Google Assistant and uses DialogFlow NLP. This means a natural, rich conversational interface is provided on all Google Assistant enabled devices, including smart watches, Android TV and even Android powered cars.

The A.I. infrastructure works as follows: Each of the four services connects directly to their own API’s to collect and interpret the data they need to help the passenger. In order to be able to run all four of services within one experience, there’s one (Tensor Flow enabled) proxy layer overarching all services that distributes passengers to the right service according to their needs.

About

KLM is a Dutch aviation pioneer with an innovative heart. With its headquarters in Amsterdam, KLM operates scheduled passenger services to more than 240 destinations worldwide. It is the oldest airline in the world, still operating under its original name (founded in 1919).

Implementation & Results

KLM Travel Assistant was launched on KLM’s social media channels as well as via a press release, tying into the launch of the Google Home in the Dutch Market. This way, KLM was positioned as one of the launching partners of Google. The news got picked up by various news outlets and relevant tech media. Although the Netherlands is a tiny market, only 5% of Dutch households owns a smart speaker, KLM has

  • been servicing up to 1000 people a week already
  • handled over 45.000 voice interactions in total
  • reaffirmed our service innovation leadership role in our home market

Roadmap 2019

With a successful launch of all four of the services in The Netherlands, the ambition is to:

  • Improve overall experience: To make the KLM voice services even smarter, by transferring contextual data from one service to another. This to enable users to switch seamlessly between them, without the loss of any data.
  • Expand services: To expand the offering of voice services across more aspects of the travel journey of KLM passengers, such as lost baggage.
  • Expand regions: To further roll out globally. At the moment three of four services are available globally.
  • Expand platforms: To roll out on more platforms, such as Amazon Alexa.