This Airline Deploys AI For Customer Complaints Monitoring

The ability to deal with a huge amount of information is extremely important for a business which receives about one million complaints annually. That is the reason why China Eastern Airlines is deploying AI to boost customer experience by using technology to customize its services for each customer.

The data labs unit of the airline is trying to handle the problems even before they happen. For example, a pilot service with which customers can give out instructions as well as feedback for their in-flight meals. With AI, the airline can make sure that the customers’ tastes and preferences are safely kept, analyzed and used in the future.

China Eastern’s idea of testing out AI food service comes when the country is encouraging the development of AI technology, calling it the fourth industrial revolution. China’s ambition is to draw level with the United States in AI tech and applications by 2020, achieve major developments by 2025 and set itself as the field’s global leader by 2030.

To assist customer relations staff, the data lab of the airline now classifies customers’ complaints and recommends solutions automatically. This helps speed up the response time and boost the overall quality.

According to a report of the Civil Aviation Administration of China, in May, China Eastern Airlines received 41.6 complaints for every million passengers. In 2019, the number of frequent flier members of the airline crossed 39.6 million, an 18.8% increase from 2018.

Zhihu, a Quora-like website of China, houses several questions from angry fliers about how to get the most satisfactory response when they send a complaint to an airline.

In fact, China has already deployed AI-powered technologies at some of its airports. In April 2018, Beijing Capital International Airport announced that for security purposes, it had installed a facial recognition system. Today, the system has been deployed at about 70 mainland China airports.