How Finnair navigated a 900% increase in requests with chat automation

Faced with skyrocketing volumes of support queries, Finnair built on established automation processes to manage this spike — maintaining first class customer support without missing a beat.

Finnair-hero
Finnair_CaseStudy_HeaderImage_628x628_2x
churn
24/7 automated chat support
productivity
900% increase in volumes handled
trends
46% faster first response times
bot
61% BHR for flight cancellations

How Finnair managed 900% higher volumes

Finnair at a glance

TheCustomer-Finnair

The customer

Finnair is Finland's largest airline, known for its sky-high standards when it comes to customer support.

TheMarket-Finnair

The market

As an international airline, Finnair flies 12 million passengers to 80 destinations around the globe every year.

TheSupportTeam-Finnair

The support team

200 customer service agents provide support in 13 languages.

TheChannels-Finnair

The channels

Finnair supports customers via their app, web form, chat, phone, and on social channels.

TheSituation-Finnair

The situation

A need to improve efficiency while elevating the high-class experience Finnair delivers to customers.

TheSolution-Finnair

The solution

AI-powered chat support and a deeply integrated automation solution.

Getting started with Ultimate

Finnair chose Ultimate because of our strong technical foundations and unparalleled ability to handle 109 languages, including the notoriously complex Finnish language. The transparency, experience, and agility of the team were also deciding factors.

Their solution went live quickly, with an AI model trained on Finnair’s 1.5 million lines of unstructured historical chat conversation. And over the last 6 years, with ongoing training, testing, and iterations, the solution continued to grow in accuracy. 

Learn about our industry-leading AI
Satu_CleanBackground
"When the demand for help quadruples overnight, our CS simply can't scale up without automation. In the busiest times, our AI agent has been handling hundreds of queries simultaneously, with a bot handled rate around 70%."

Satu Karaksela
Service Manager (Digital Customer Service), Finnair

CRM Integration Salesforce-Finnair
Automation rate across all languages 35%
Bot handled rate for flight cancellations 61%
Finnair_CaseStudy_ContentBlock_1-1

AI use case spotlight #1: Managing support request spikes

  • Finnair had just implemented chat automation when the pandemic hit and request volumes skyrocketed by up to 900%.

  • Their customer service team added pandemic-specific messaging to the AI bot’s welcome message and built dedicated support paths to manage cancellations and refunds.

  • Finnair reached a 50% automation rate at the height of the pandemic and has built a robust contact center that is fully prepared to weather any future storms.
Build a bot in minutes with UltimateGPT
Finnair_ContentBlock-1

AI use case spotlight #2: Increasing automation rate for flight cancellations

  • Half of all flight cancellation requests were being escalated to a human agent, but Finnair knew that in many situations, this request could be entirely automated. By analyzing customer needs and matching those with Finnair's, they reworked how their bot approached handling cancellations. 

  • They built out dialogue flows that would direct customers down the right service paths. Then, those that could self-serve could continue on dealing with the bot, and those that required escalation could speak to an agent ASAP.

  • After making these updates, their bot handled rate for cancellations increased from 49% to 61.4% and their escalated conversations decreased from 49% to 36.5%.

The success story

Multilingual-Finnair

Multilingual support

For a global brand, multilingual AI is a must. Building on the success of their Finnish bot, they launched additional languages including Swedish and English.

Scalable-Finnair

Scalable solution

With a robust automation strategy in place, Finnair is set to manage any contact volume spikes without letting service quality drop.

Powerful-Finnair

Powerfully integrated

During our collaboration, Ultimate supported a seamless transition to Salesforce from Giosg. And backend connectivity means Finnair sees even more value with AI.

Dialogue-Finnair

Advanced dialogue builder

When they notice patterns in user behavior, Finnair can easily update existing dialogue flows to send customers down the appropriate paths to resolve their requests with AI.

What's next on their automation journey?

When it comes to improving their customer experience through automation, Finnair is in it for the long haul. The next leg on Finnair and Ultimate’s journey will include building more backend integrations to increase automation rates even further. They’re also very excited about UltimateGPT and have plans to test it within the coming months. It will be their first customer-facing generative AI-powered solution.

Ready to start your automation journey?

Contact sales