There is a need to upgrade Vistara’s digital experience, and its employees and customers are in for a “huge” digital upgrade with the merger into Air India, said the latter’s chief digital and technology officer, Satya Ramaswamy, on Friday.
Moreover, he revealed that Air India’s generative artificial intelligence-powered chatbot, ‘AI.g,’ has slashed customer service costs so “drastically” that the airline has completely scrapped plans for a new customer service centre.
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Vistara will operate its last flight on November 11 as part of its merger with Tata Group-owned Air India. It will continue to operate its fleet and maintain its schedule under its brand name until early 2025. Vistara is a 51:49 joint venture between the Tata Group and Singapore Airlines (SIA).
Ramaswamy, while speaking during the CAPA India Digital Aviation Summit on Monday, said: “Our chairman (N Chandrasekaran) told me right at the beginning to first focus on fixing the customer issues and removing their pain points, and the issues related to the enterprise can be resolved in parallel. It was also clear at that time that the transformation was going to happen not just at Air India.”
“We realised that we also need to upgrade the Vistara experience from a digital perspective. So, the merger is about to happen pretty soon, and Vistara’s employees and customers are in for a huge digital upgrade with the merger into Air India,” he mentioned.
On the issue of digital focus, Ramaswamy gave the example of the new Air India app, which has been rated 4.7-4.8 on app stores. “This is really high for an airline app. We are benchmarking ourselves against the best airlines in the world,” he stated.
Air India launched ‘AI.g’ last year. “It has been a huge success. It handles about 3,000 queries a day. It has a customer contentment ratio of 97 per cent, which means that it has been able to satisfactorily answer customer queries in 97 per cent of cases. Only three per cent of the queries get escalated to our customer service agent,” he stated.
“People are really floored by what it can do. It has drastically cut down our contact centre costs. Practically, we have eliminated the need to put one entire contact centre because AI.g is handling all the questions,” he noted.
First Published: Sep 30 2024 | 7:37 PM IST
