Customer’s success story: Zoey
In recent years, travel providers have struggled to attract new customers. According to the company called Zoey, no technology will ever replace humans, so it is time to adopt the principle of real Human 2 Human communication in the travel and hospitality industry. When Rajneesh Badal, the Founder of Zoey, needed assistance with Artificial Intelligence solutions that could support their special business objectives, the cooperation with Cloudflight developed quite naturally. Since Cloudflight’s Dutch unit was located in the same shared office space in Amsterdam where Zoey was set up, they had the opportunity to see firsthand how our team works. They were immediately impressed both by what Cloudflight employees were doing with technology and how they were doing it. The rest is history.
The Zoey and Cloudflight story
“We started Zoey, the virtual assistant, back in 2017, after our previous startup in travel and mobility failed. We took what we had learned and from this experience and completely rethought the way we worked and how to deliver value for our customers,” explained Rajneesh Badal, Founder and CEO of Zoey. “We are still following this approach today and it has helped us to get where we are now. In 2018, I met Clemens Rath, the Location Lead of the Amsterdam office at Cloudflight, and we started chatting about how we could start working together. After we visited the Cloudflight Linz office, where everyone already seemed to know us, we were convinced. Our partnership started, and a few months later, we already received the first benefits from the technology Cloudflight created for us.”
What does Zoey do?
Zoey helps travelers when they are on the road on their destination. The process works as follows: Among the customers of Zoey are companies that ask their travelers if they want to use the service of Zoey. They have to send a registration message to the platform. After registration, Zoey collects preferences from the travelers, gives travel tips, and answers questions, much like a travel agent would do.
Before the collaboration between Cloudflight and Zoey, the startup communicated with travelers on a manual basis. They used g-drive excel sheets as a travel tip database, and live travel agents messaged with the travelers. In total, it took them in about 30 minutes per traveler per trip. To grow their service (more customers, more travelers, more countries), they needed to get rid of manual steps. Last year they communicated with more than 30,000 travelers. So, Zoey has been developing a proper backoffice-application and besides that, in collaboration with Cloudflight, they have been applying Natural Language Processing on incoming messages.
Zoey blends the latest technologies with the highest and most personal level of communication between an active customer and their travel provider.
The USP of Zoey
If travel companies ask themselves why they should choose Zoey instead of other technology service providers, Zoey has a well-prepared answer: their platform is powered by real people complemented with enterprise-grade artificial intelligence while creating an emotional connection to any traveler, at any time, and at any destination.
According to Rajneesh, the USP is the fact that they not only create a relationship by using AI but also by hyper-personalizing it. “Where current automated solutions are providing answers that are standardized messages based on a standard profile, we continuously refine the customer profiles based on the conversations we have with that traveler/end-user. During the conversation, we adjust our answers to the context a traveler is in. This way we really help travelers and are able to reach the highest levels of customer satisfaction in the industry.”
AI influences employee satisfaction
If mobility experts are asked about the benefit of AI in the industry, lots of them mention autonomous driving first and foremost, emphasizing vehicle safety and perfect route planning. Rajneesh dives deeper when answering this question: “I think we need to consider what impact AI will have on employee satisfaction. What we can see within our own company: you no longer will be working from task to task, because the machine will perform that work for you. So, more time will be freed up for employees to think about questions like: how can we make our service, product, company, etc. even better for our customers? That’s a very creative task that will have a huge impact on how we work together and the satisfaction we get from our jobs and, I believe, will be one of the most important drivers of company performance.”
Pitfalls and solutions in mobility
“Travel providers have struggled to attract new customers in recent years. The cost of new customer acquisition has increased exponentially in the last few years. Differentiation between travel providers has been limited.”, according to the Zoey website. Every actor in this field should somehow face these pitfalls and solve some industrial problems. The question is: how? “If you are honest about it, travel and mobility have become commodities. Everyone is offering the same products, through the same channels. The only way to create a difference in a traveler’s life is by establishing an emotional connection and continuing to nurture this,” professes Rajneesh. “This is where technology, and especially AI, comes into the picture: establishing an emotional connection on scale. By working with a partner like Cloudflight, we were able to benefit from AI much sooner and faster than if we would have done it by ourselves.”
The future brings expansion
When we asked the Founder of Zoey about the future, he shared very ambitious plans with us: “Currently, we are seeing that our use case in travel and mobility is working very well. So, it’s time for us to expand to new markets. I can imagine that you will get to know Zoey as your educational assistant or as your job coach soon. The first cooperations within these new markets are starting this quarter. We are now preparing our platform together with Cloudflight to be multi-market proof and, of course, expand our functionalities to even better serve our customers.”