The customer OctopusTravel is a leading online travel company offering discounted hotels in 112 countries worldwide apartments, sightseeing tours, their own travel guides and other travel related services. OctopusTravel pride themselves on offering a service that surpasses their customers' expectations. Their dedicated Customer Care Centre supports the web site with staff on hand to answer questions by telephone and email, thus providing the human interface that even the most confident of web shoppers appreciate.

The issues and the stakes

With the volume of customer email enquiries growing on a daily basis OctopusTravel required a solution to manage and respond to these effectively. Average response time to an email was around 48 hours, which was unacceptable for a customer-focussed company like OctopusTravel. The danger in making their customers wait 48 hours for a response to a question about a particular hotel or service is that they will book elsewhere in the meantime.

Akio Mail Center deployment

In April 2003, OctopusTravel purchased Akio Mail Center from Email Center UK Limited, who implemented and supported the solution. OctopusTravel chose Akio because of its simplicity to use. “Out of all the solutions we looked at Akio was the most userfriendly system. This means that there are minimal training requirements for our users” highlights Joseph Gleeson, Customer Services Manager at OctopusTravel.

Akio intelligently routes all emails through to the next free agent or the agent who has the right skill set for answering the customer’s question. The Artificial Intelligence (AI) engine then provides the agent with the top five likely responses to the customer’s questions. Over time additional templates can be added to the AI engine creating a knowledge base. This will increase the percentage of emails that can be responded to using the AI engine and also allow agents to search the knowledge base for an answer.

Alternatively if the AI engine or searching the knowledge base does not produce a suitable template to use then an agent can either type a new answer or forward it to another agent whom might be better suited at answering the question.

Serving customers across the globe OctopusTravel also needed to ensure that any AI engine or knowledge base could work with multiple languages. The AI engine can process emails and suggest responses in any language, unlike the majority of competing email response management systems that can usually only handle a single language.

Agents are not restricted to answering each email individually. Where there are multiple emails that all demand the same answer the agent can reply to all of these at once. The response appears to be tailored to each individual customer although the agent has only had to write one reply.

Once an agent has replied to a customers email all future email enquiries from that particular email address will be routed through to the same agent creating a personal relationship between OctopusTravel and their customers.

The benefits

Reduced response time 

The impact these features had on the Customer Care Centre was enormous. Joseph has carried out detailed analysis of these statistics Akio produces. "The statistics show that average response time to emails has been reduced from 48 hours to only 4 hours. We attribute this to the AI engine and the suggested answers this produces. We have calculated that 50% of the emails we receive are answered with the aid of the AI. This and the ability to send a single reply to multiple customers has reduced the time it takes to compose an answer from an average of 6 minutes to only 3 minutes and 5 seconds".

Improved customer and client interaction

Customers have benefited not only from the reduced response time to their emails but a general enhancement aided by Akio. Akio instantly replies to every email a customer sends to OctopusTravel with a standard response thanking them for their enquiry and a receipt number. The customer then has the option of telephoning the call centre where they can give the receipt number to the agent who can instantly bring up their email on screen and answer their question.

Customer Service Manager Joseph Gleeson believes this has played an important part in the overall increase in customer satisfaction levels. “The auto-response and receipt number gives reassurance to our customers that their enquiry is being dealt with promptly and has helped contribute to an increase in customer satisfaction and loyalty.”

On the rare occasions that OctopusTravel receive complaints by email Akio will assist Joseph and his team by recording the entire history of that customers email enquiries and the replies sent by OctopusTravel so they can view their entire correspondence at a glance. This enables a fast and satisfactory resolution of all complaints. OctopusTravel are now responding to as many as 20,000 emails a month within a 12-hour response time. They achieve this with only 4 customer service agents responding to emails. Within the next 12 months OctopusTravel expect the response time to be as little as 4 hours. 

Fast ROI

These vast improvements in productivity and service levels have enabled OctopusTravel to gain a return on investment in only 9 months. In fact OctopusTravel have calculated that they only need to receive volumes of 80 emails a day before the extra productivity tools in Akio pay for themselves.

OctopusTravel are now in the process of deploying Akio across other UK departments and global offices as they seek to realise the benefits of improved customer service levels and increased productivity savings across their global operation.