Artificial intelligence (AI) has started to transform our lives in many ways, and that includes travel planning! AI can improve efficiency and level up a user's experience, but we believe it’s still a far cry from the human touch we all appreciate in customer experience.
At Klook, we have our own Customer Experience Group that continues to be at the forefront of providing users with quality support throughout their consumer journey, be it inquiries about our products or changes required to their bookings. But we wouldn’t consider ourselves to be obsessed with our customers if we didn’t consider the adoption of the latest technology like AI to enhance their experience.
We caught up with our Chief Product Officer, David Liu, to get the tea on our customer obsession philosophy and how AI plays a role in it.
David Liu
Chief Product Officer
Can you shed light on Klook's customer obsession philosophy and how we plan to improve customer experience?
Everything we do here at Klook revolves around creating seamless experiences from a customer-centric perspective. From making the booking process smoother, offering personalized recommendations, working with our partners for better prices, services, and deals, to creating new products and models that make sense to customers, it’s all about standing in the customers’ shoes and asking ourselves, “If I was a customer, what would I want?”
At this stage, we’re improving user experience from different facets of our business and culture:
Building an internal culture
We want to make sure 'customer obsession' is not just a buzzword, and it certainly does not refer only to the work our Customer Experience Group delivers. It has to be a shared mindset that every Klooker - customer-facing or not - carries into their day-to-day work.
Features to solve fundamental customer problems
We introduce and finetune features for a quick and easy booking flow, reliable booking confirmation and fulfillment, “all you need to know” for booking steps, flexible self-serve cancellation and amendments, etc.
Day-to-day “small” but meaningful optimizations
From wordings and icons to clearer and well-organized content, we implement quick fixes that help us constantly improve from a customer angle.
How are we incorporating AI into the Klook app to further our customer obsession efforts?
We developed Klook AI, aptly named ‘K.Ai’, to help our customers make travel decisions. It can answer questions regarding everything you need to know about an activity before making up your mind. It can even help you compare the different packages offered.
In the next stage, K.Ai will be able to answer questions not only about activities but all the categories we provide on our Klook platform. You can ask questions like, “Does JR Pass cover Tokyo, Osaka, and Fukuoka?”
We’re also turning K.Ai into an assistant that helps you plan your trip through interactive Q&A, from the number of people and days to destination and budget. From there, it tailors its recommendations to what’s best for you on Klook.
The purple AI icon you see here was our first logo. With it just displaying the word ‘AI’, users may mistake it for AI translation. After consulting our Branding team, we ultimately landed on ‘K.Ai’ in the logo you see today.
Ta-dah! Here’s our K.Ai logo comprising a dialogue box with a smiley face.
This is the design of our prototype. It would only display a full response once the search was completed. However, we realized that the wait time would result in anxiety among users. To overcome this issue, we enhanced K.Ai's interaction with customers further. We designed it to display results as it loads, creating the effect that K.Ai is typing, similar to our user experience on ChatGPT.
We also discovered that customers might struggle to generate a prompt. Our UX writers then crafted default prompts so users can select whichever best matches their query. The simple prompts users can expect are:
- What's the cancellation policy?
- When's the pick-up time?
- Is this experience OK for kids?
This helps users save some time from typing too!
To show what you can expect when 'conversing' with K.Ai, our editor downloaded the testing app to demonstrate an example. Let's go for our bestselling Standard Desert Safari in Dubai!
How can the implementation of conversational AI elevate customer experience at Klook?
Other than K.Ai, which is a customer-facing tool, we also focus on the internal usage of AI among Klookers. Right now, we are looking into how we can leverage AI to improve our internal workflows and efficiencies, which would help generate better results for customers. Some projects that are on our team’s list include:
- AI-assisted customer service
- AI-assisted content polishing or localization
- AI-assisted quality assurance
We foresee that these AI implementations can make our Klookers' jobs easier, and executions quicker.
Join our Research & Development Team
Without naming companies, have you personally encountered a user experience journey that Klook can aspire to? If so, what was that journey like?
Although not entirely related to travel booking, I encountered something interesting about how things can be done from a customer-centric angle.
I ordered a pair of shoes online the other day. They delivered 3 pairs in different sizes, including the size I selected, a bigger size, and a smaller size. From this selection, I was able to pick the best size (surprise: it turned out to not be the one I selected) and return the other two pairs (for free!). I was impressed with this experience!
Do you, like us, believe in creating added value for a better customer experience?
Posted by Klook Careers
- Artificial Intelligence
- Customer Obsession
- Leadership
- Research & Development
- Tech
