Conversational AI is a game changer in business today. Almost every website today has, at the very least, a chatbot. Depending on the kind of business and degree of customer interaction, the applicability of chatbots varies. Typically, customer service is one function across businesses where chatbots are seeing maximum traction, and the market is growing for AI-powered customer service with a positive ROI. Over time, traditional bots have paved the way for intelligent virtual assistants that are using NLP and ML to correctly point out a customer’s pain point and provide a solution.

Haptik, a leader in the conversational AI space recently worked with a customer in the travel sector called House of Tours to increase their lead generation metrics. House of Tours reported a 146% increase in lead generation after deploying the Haptik chatbot.

Haptik has been instrumental in driving transformational ROI with personalized, instant support that empowers our customers to search for holiday packages, change their bookings, explore visa eligibility, and lots more by directly interacting with the IVA – thereby freeing agents to handle high-value conversations. Using the IVA, we’ve been successfully able to convert website visitors into paying customers, without investing in additional marketing efforts, said Shijin T.N, Product Manager, House of Tours

Established in 2006, House of Tours is a holding company with diversified investments in multiple business sectors such as Travel, Aviation, Insurance, and Management Consulting, with a consolidated turnover of AED 54 Million and 9 companies under its canopy. With over 350,000 happy customers and 300+ travel destinations, House of Tour’s key motto is to deliver unparalleled travel experience by truly understanding customers and meeting their expectations at all costs.

One of the core challenges faced by House of Tours was a long wait time on their platform leading to an unsatisfactory customer experience.

House of Tours drives average traffic of half a million every month. As House of Tours’ popularity grew, so did the number of customer inquiries, bogging down agent productivity. Without a self-service solution in place, guests were forced to wait long durations to reach an agent – putting the travel company’s reputation at risk. The House of Tours’ team was eager to make their customer service better and faster. They partnered with Haptik to introduce an automation-first customer support strategy across multiple channels.

The key objectives of the IVA included:

• Reduce wait times causing bad CX
• Provide quality support on the go
• Make support seamless across all communication channels

The solution was to automate repetitive queries. Within the first few weeks of launching Haptik’s IVA as the first line of support, House of Tours started seeing an increase in user conversations and signups to learn more about their holiday packages.

This is how the most-frequently answered queries by the IVA:

Haptik also deployed the IVA on WhatsApp and Facebook to help the brand drive high-quality leads from these new communication channels. The IVA played a significant role in decreasing customer effort and raising CSAT for the brand, leading to reduced wait times & enhanced customer experience.

Within five months of going live, the IVA seamlessly handled 75% of the queries end to end, and another 20% partially, achieving total automation of 89%. Whenever a human touch was required, users were seamlessly routed from instant chat to live agents, ensuring consistent customer experience. 

Using the IVA, House of Tours drastically reduced wait times and improved their lead conversion ratio by 146% from 37%. The combination of automation and instant support enabled the brand to provide exceptional CX winning the team an average feedback rating of 4/5. And lastly, the IVA was able to generate an ROI of 4.5X for House of Tours.