90 million-passenger airline adopts Unbabel’s unique translation platform to serve new geographies and customer bases and saves up to 76% compared to native speaker service
Unbabel, the AI-powered, human-refined Translation-as-a-Service platform, has partnered with easyJet, Europe’s leading airline, to drive new efficiencies and improved service to its customers across multiple languages.
Unbabel is enabling the airline to offer near real-time translation of customer chat and enquiry tickets, in up to 29 languages, via its unique machine translation technology. This is opening up more languages to easyJet and increasing customer satisfaction within existing customer bases.
The translation platform is also equipping easyJet to deal effectively with a wider customer base ensuring their queries are handled quickly and efficiently without the need to wait for human translators or relying on internet translations.
Since late 2018, all of easyJet’s Dutch and German live chat has been handled by English speakers using the AI-powered platform and during that time customer satisfaction has increased 4.2% when compared to languages served by native speakers. Additionally, German rose from 5th to 2nd in terms of popularity of language within easyJet customer enquiries.
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An initial pilot project ran over two months in 2017, coinciding with easyJet’s busiest annual period, and challenged Unbabel to provide near real-time translation of customer enquiries. Through adopting the translation-as-a-service platform, easyJet observed an improvement in average handling time for enquiries.
Karen Cox, Director of Ground Operations & Customer Management Centres, at easyJet, said: “Unbabel’s solution helps to maintain a high level of quality and customer satisfaction and provides us with flexibility during language spikes. Our Unbabel-powered ‘super agents’ are ensuring that we stay agile as a company and means that we are now able to offer everyone the same high-level customer journey. With a major drive to deliver value on behalf of the customer, we feel confident that Unbabel offers the best solution.”
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Vasco Pedro, CEO of Unbabel, commented: “In 2019, more and more businesses are waking up to the fact that they are operating in an ever more multilingual market. When customer satisfaction is at the top of the business agenda, being able to serve customers immediately in their native language represents a great competitive advantage. We’re delighted to partner with easyJet, and have already seen a demonstrable impact on customer satisfaction and customer retention metrics.”
Cox added: “Knowing that Unbabel has the integrated AI and human platform to support the user journey really demonstrated the warmth and care we look for in our customer service.”
Looking to the future, Unbabel is set to help easyJet move into further new markets, with plans to accommodate customers from countries such as China and the Nordics. The airline will also invest in messaging to a far greater degree, serving customers through channels like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Apple Business Chat. As a result of Unbabel’s, easyJet customer advisers will continue their exposure to new geographies and markets, as well as building experience with disruptive new technologies like AI and Machine Learning.
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