Norwegian is the fifth largest low-cost airline and one of the fastest growing airlines in the world, with approximately 11,000 employees and 37 million passengers in 2018. Many passengers get in touch before, during, and after their journey, so Norwegian has a high volume of customer enquiries. More and more of these enquiries are coming in through chat, and a chatbot enables Norwegian to be well-equipped to take care of their customers.

“We want to be available to our customers around the clock and improve the response time in other channels. The chatbot helps us with both,” says Vegard Andersen, Principal Advisor Service Delivery at Norwegian.

Around a thousand people work with customer service in Norwegian. They are available day and night on the phone, live chat, email and social media. As these customer enquiries began to pile up, Norwegian knew they needed a better way to automate their customer support systems, otherwise their team would become overwhelmed.

To meet the growing demand for chat as well as providing immediate support, Norwegian wanted to explore the potential of chatbot technology. So, they went through a process where they evaluated several suppliers, including Kindly.

Norwegian was happy that Kindly wanted to manage the project without involving a third party. The project group consisted of people with different areas of expertise. Some group members had expertise in tourism, while others had solid experience around the topic of customer support. Norwegian also included specialists in tone-of-voice and plain language, which comes in handy when making sure the chatbot communicates well with Norwegian’s customers.

The chatbot has reduced the number of enquiries on other channels, which has resulted in shorter waiting times for the customers and less work-related stress for Norwegian’s customer support center. The chatbot provides Norwegian with good opportunities to shift customer support resources to more complex enquiries, for example, by providing customized information to customers affected by specific events.

“Shortly after we started using the chatbot, 18 of our Boeing 737 MAX aircrafts were grounded. This, of course, led to a number of questions. We quickly updated the chatbot with information related to questions customers had about this topic,” says Vegard Andersen, Principle Delivery Specialist.

Kindly’s chatbot can also find bookings and help with additional sales - a huge benefit for Norwegian’s conversion rates. It is trained to look for typical questions related to bookings, seats and luggage, so it knows when to ask customers to confirm the booking information before passing them on to relevant opportunities for additional sales on Norwegian's website.