AI transforms VoC analysis for Flight Centre

When CX Network researched the Global State of CX in 2024, almost one third (29 percent) of CX practitioners said extracting actionable insights from data is a top three challenge at present. Despite the challenge, 21 percent plan to invest in voice of the customer (VoC) or voice of the employee (VoE) initiatives this year, a move that will generate even more data for analysis.

To utilize large volumes of data, organizations are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to collect, analyze and improve the quality of data, in ways that humans cannot.
One such organization is Flight Centre, which is using AI to act on structured and unstructured feedback across emails, chat, messaging, social, online reviews, traditional surveys and other sources.

Headquartered in Australia, the global travel agency is one of the first organizations in the Asia-Pacific region to use Qualtrics’ AI-powered conversational analytics and natural language processing (NLP) technologies for this purpose.

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Utilizing structured and unstructured feedback

Flight Centre opened its first leisure branch in Sydney, Australia, in 1982. Now a public company headquartered in Brisbane, the agency is one of the world’s largest travel retailers and the flagship brand of Flight Centre Travel Group.

However, in an industry as competitive and emotive as travel CX is everything and, to remain a top player, seamless, efficient journeys must be delivered at every touch point.

To do this, Flight Centre needed to understand the emotion, intent, preference and effort behind every customer engagement, and around key buying decisions, such as service and product quality, price, point of sale, trip experience, and travel experience.

While structured feedback can go so far, it only covers half the story. By combining it with unstructured feedback, Flight Centre has a higher-resolution view of its customers that considers more than satisfaction and post-sale surveys.

Since early 2024, Flight Centre has analyzed millions of sentences of unstructured feedback shared by its customers and has scaled the capabilities across its omnichannel suite over several months. The insights generated inform CX improvements that allow Flight Centre to deliver tailored experiences that address customers’ unmet needs and points of friction. The company says this creates opportunities to enhance the CX in the moments and channels that matter.

“While the needs, expectations, and behaviors of travelers continue to change at an accelerated rate, Flight Centre is able to deeply understand and respond to their needs better than ever before with Qualtrics,” says Flight Centre global MD, Andrew Stark.

“Listening and responding to feedback has always been critical to our team, and with the new capabilities we are able to uncover even more actionable, specific insights that can help us deliver greater services, experiences, and products for our millions of customers,” he adds.

READ MORE: Australia’s spending habits highlight CX focus

Overcoming the challenges in data

Although CX leaders realize the challenges that exist when collecting, analyzing and leveraging huge volumes of data from the contact center, those who succeed have an opportunity to inform the strategy of the entire organization.

Structured and unstructured feedback can signal where customer journeys need to be refined, if and how channels and agents meet expectations, where service elements do or do not work and many other insights, all of which are central to overall company performance.

“To deliver the personalized, human experiences customers are looking for today, organizations need the ability to improve every experience in the moment, across every channel and engagement that matters,” says Brad Anderson, president of product, UX, and engineering at Qualtrics. “Using Qualtrics AI, organizations like Flight Centre are pioneering an impactful new age for experience management by deepening their ability to understand and meaningfully respond to their customers, which is driving greater outcomes for customers alongside bottom-line business impact,” he adds.

According to its 2023 financial results, Flight Centre is using AI alongside machine learning (ML) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to improve CX and achieve its sales and savings objectives. As it works to increase productivity, reduce costs and enhance the experiences it offers, Flight Centre has also developed proprietary platforms to support its omnichannel evolution and offer its agents as a single access point to its suite of digital tools.

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