When excellence is one of the most important values of your mission as a company, the Contact & Service Center plays a strategic role. Even more, if your business is in the Travel sector, where competition is high and the differentiation of the offer is largely based on a company's ability to offer the best experience to its customers.

This was the main challenge for Meliá Hotels International when, at the beginning of 2019, it began to automate processes that were basic at an operational level but provided little value to its customers. The solution was to incorporate a virtual assistant, but how to maintain the human touch in assistance and advice while implementing such a solution?

A conversational system helps to increase the efficiency and profitability of many tasks carried out in the Customer Experience Center. But, the challenge lay in combining this solution with the personalized attention that Meliá has always offered its customers. 

Flexibility in the face of unforeseen events

One of the advantages offered by Dialogflow, the Google Cloud tool for developing virtual assistants, is that it enables natural and enriched conversations. Its advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) system provides that "human touch", which is key for Meliá.

In this sense, the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) console offered enough flexibility to customize and evolve the assistant almost in real time. This made it possible to adapt it to the specific use cases that arose during the pandemic, such as executing an end-to-end cancellation.

Multi-language voice assistant

At the beginning of the project, Meliá's Virtual Voice Assistant became the first point of contact with customers in Spanish and later in English, being able to identify multiple intents. 

To this end, a team of computational linguists, specialized in several languages, was in charge of training the conversational agent.

As Elena de la Torre, Global Director at Meliá Hotels International explains, "One of the main success factors of this project has been the way we have implemented and the tandem created from the beginning between emergya and Meliá Hotels International based on efficiency and constant analytics and always focusing on the loyal and High Value customer. This matter has allowed us to obtain results in the short-medium term, continue learning and improving our ratios as well as the Customer Experience".

Agents dedicated to providing value to the customer

Thanks to the implementation of the virtual voice assistant, Customer Experience Centre agents can spend more time on queries that are relevant to customers so that the service provided to the end-user is of higher quality.

The assistant filters out hang-ups, silent calls and calls that are resolved with predefined information. It also solves other key tasks in the sector that have been automated: booking cancellations, providing details about hotels and services, checking points balances or booking information, etc.  

Currently, Meliá Hotels International's Virtual Voice Assistant handles 100% of calls from 41 main lines in Spanish and 5 in English. 

In 75% of all calls handled, the behavior of Meliá's Virtual Voice Assistant has been correct.

In 14% of all calls handled, Meliá's Virtual Voice Assistant resolved the call directly and it was not necessary to transfer the call to our agents.

In 2021, the average of 2,000 calls handled per day has been exceeded.