How Swiss Airlines is delivering hyper-personalization at scale

The airline industry is working hard to deliver highly personalized and memorable experiences that not only keep passengers coming back, but keep them talking about their customer journeys, just as much as their travel journeys.

Although airlines have access to a new generation of tools powered by artificial intelligence (AI), many operate on legacy systems, posing challenges to innovation. However, in a bid to inspire its passengers to try new and different destinations, Swiss International Airlines has introduced a generative AI-powered chatbot that helps customers discover new travel opportunities by asking about their specific holiday preferences and bringing them fresh ideas.

Known as Heidi, the bot is helping to drive customer engagement and travel inspiration, in line with the airline’s brand identity.

Edward Pauls, the airline’s digital adoption and innovation expert, will be sharing the full story during All Access: The AI revolution in CX, taking place March 25-26.

Ahead of the event, he tells CX Network how and why Heidi was developed, how the human touch has been preserved and how practitioners in all industries can better collaborate with CX solution providers.

CX Network: You’re delivering the first session at All Access: The AI revolution in CX, which will focus on the development of Heidi. Tell us more about the session…

Edward Pauls: We want to inspire people when they visit our website to look for trips. They know they want to travel but perhaps don’t know where to.

For example, with Heidi, they can tell us that they are a family of three with a dog, and they’re looking for destinations with a beach. The bot will then give them suggestions and perhaps it will be a specific destination that person would never have dreamed of visiting, but it’s a great fit for their needs.

The bot can diversify the approach of people who visit our site, help them to understand our whole portfolio and personalize the outputs based on their specific needs. We would never be able to accomplish that widespread level of personalization without AI.

Heidi is already publicly available and the early feedback from our customers is essential. It took three to four months to develop, and we collaborated with Google, but as with all AI, development is ongoing.

CX Network: What were the specific customer needs that Heidi is designed to meet and address?

Edward Pauls: We are trying to inspire people to fly with us via social media channels and we receive mixed feedback because people oftentimes use other channels to get their first ideas and then they visit our website to look for specific flights. However, they don’t think of attempting to ask us on about the flight would best fit their needs.

Therefore, we wanted to take a different approach to open up the customer’s options and better meet their needs. It's a switch in mindset for the customers using the tool, because they're so used to coming to us and saying ‘hey I want to go from Zurich to London’ instead of saying ‘I want to go somewhere, inspire me’ and us presenting them with possibilities.

When we tested it with selected users it was a very interesting experience for them.

CX Network: AI has come a long way in recent years, but it still poses some challenges, sometimes that's around team training, sometimes it's around data readiness. As you see it today, what are the top challenges for AI and CX?

Edward Pauls: For us as an airline it's an interesting topic because the airline industry is so focused on security and making travel safe, that we are often lagging on the newest and latest innovations for engagement or experience.

As an industry, we are also a little hesitant of adopting everything right away, but we are still trying to get those new technologies in various ways. Heidi is one of them and the intention is to improve the experience of the people that fly with us.

One of our main challenges is integrating AI with our existing systems, some of which are built on older frameworks that were established decades ago. This makes the process both complex and fascinating, as we work to bridge the gap between legacy infrastructure and cutting-edge technology.

Data privacy and security is definitely key and the EU AI Act is now in full force. For Swiss International Airlines, the human touch especially is key; how can we preserve our brand identity when using chatbots and how can we instruct the chatbot in a way that is really representing Swiss and not just a general large language model (LLM) that is producing nice sounding information, but is not representing our brand and our core identity?

CX Network: Our latest research into the Global State of CX found that AI in all its forms is heavily influencing the work of CX practitioners. In fact, among the top 10 CX trends this year, AI accounts for eight. In your opinion, what does this strong focus on AI says about the current trajectory for CX?

Edward Pauls: At Swiss International Airlines, we saw the demand for hyper-personalization emerged as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, and it took over at all the airlines. However, because so many airlines are so bound in those legacy systems they're really struggling to offer this kind of experience; a unique flight experience tailored to your needs.

We have around 200,000 people traveling with us every week, and that’s in low season. How do you give each one of them a tailored experience? The only answer is AI.

There's no way we can get people to work efficiently to offer this experience and therefore AI is key to delivering hyper-personalization and this is what we see is necessary to move the airline industry forward and into the future.

CX Network: Swiss collaborated with Google for this project. What are your top tips for how practitioners should work with AI solution providers when procuring and developing their own AI tools?

Edward Pauls: My recommendation would be always start internally first, use AI in core processes behind the scenes before you start getting into the customer-facing experience.

This step-by-step approach gives you confidence and then helps you to really tailor the resulting experience to the customers’ needs. Otherwise, you will run into problems very fast. That is one key concern in the airline industry.

To mitigate the risk around Heidi, our website uses AI but you will never get an answer directly curated by AI. Rather it will give you the response, but the answer itself has already been provided by a specific system to ensure it is always sound travel advice. Those additional guardrails are really, really important.

Click here to find out more about All Access: The AI revolution in CX and register to watch Edward’s session.

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