How AI is Helping TravelBird Remake its Customer Service

Online travel agency TravelBird has been so swamped with business in recent months that it began looking for ways to free up time for its 100 travel advisors so they can continue to assist their customers while still finding time to answer a constant flood of incoming text chats and other social media inquiries. It's all part of TravelBird's mission to work closely with its customers, helping them to carefully plan and research unique travel opportunities they likely would not have found on their own, Fiona Vanderbroeck-Vernooij, who heads travel service and care for the company, told ITPro. The problem was that the company's travel agents had become so overloaded with incoming texts and other social media messages seeking information on flight changes, airport gates, rental cars and other topics that they were being taxed to keep up with the high level of service being sought by the company, she said. To battle that trend, the company began looking at how technology could help. After a search, it found DigitalGenius, which offers its Human AI Customer Service platform that works with either Salesforce or ZenDesk customer service products to automate many of the repetitive tasks customer service agents face every day.