In our rapidly advancing digital world, customers expect a fast and increasingly personalised experience.

Customers consistently provide feedback that time is the biggest stress factor when travelling, so Air New Zealand custom-built an innovation that offers more self-service options. Oscar, an artificial intelligence-backed chatbot, was released in February 2017.

In his first week, Oscar correctly answered 7% of customer questions across 120 topics. On a busy day, he chats to more than 1000 people and can resolve 67% of queries across 350+ subjects of increasing complexity. His knowledge and content can be added to based on actual consumer needs, making him a highly effective and entirely response-driven bot.

By automating routine tasks and helping reduce pressure on the contact centre, Oscar enables front-line staff to focus on more complex customer needs for an overall better service experience. Agility is another of Oscar’s strengths as his knowledge can be updated to address new customer needs, like swiftly handling the Auckland jet fuel shortage in September.

Along with his customer service benefits, Oscar is a valuable insight capture tool, providing real-time feedback on where improvements can be made across multiple customer touchpoints.

Oscar has created quite a stir in the industry with many companies now approaching Air New Zealand to discuss artificial intelligence. Seeing more happy customers get the fast, 1:1 level of personalised help they need in the channel of their choice is the greatest reward of all.