TUI Austria and Lime Connect: The GPT Bot Driving the Customer Experience of Tomorrow
Nearly half of all vacationers book their trips online. That’s why tour operators are investing in expanding their digital communication channels. Forward-thinking companies like TUI Austria are taking it a step further by offering travel planning support to website visitors through GPT-4-powered chatbots.
TUI Austria is part of the TUI Group, one of the world’s leading tourism companies. With more than 180 destinations worldwide, the tour operator offers a wide range of travel options — from beach holidays and round trips to cruises and city breaks, covering all types of vacations.
The company employs around 500 staff across four locations in Vienna, Salzburg, and Innsbruck, in addition to 61 local TUI travel agencies.
Improving Customer Satisfaction with Website Chat
As a company that constantly strives for innovation, TUI decided nearly a decade ago not to rely solely on traditional channels like phone and email.
To provide prospective travelers with a high level of service and further increase customer satisfaction, the company started looking for new ways to support customers online.
We wanted to open the door to a new and exciting communication channel for our customers and, in doing so, boost customer satisfaction. At the same time, we saw an opportunity to gather valuable feedback through the chat.
Before beginning its search for a suitable chat provider, the TUI Austria project team defined four key selection criteria.
- Quick implementation: A solution that can be integrated quickly and seamlessly into existing business systems.
- Direct contact: A dedicated account manager who understands the company’s specific needs and is responsive to questions and concerns.
- Intuitive UI: User-friendly software design that works well for both employees and customers.
- Good value for money: A solution that meets TUI Austria’s requirements while offering a fair price-performance ratio. This includes not just the initial cost, but also long-term cost-effectiveness.
What convinced us most were Lime Connect’s good value for money and its straightforward integration. Having a dedicated contact person who supports us promptly with any issues or customization requests has given us lasting confidence.
Implementing Lime Connect was a quick and smooth process for TUI Austria. After a brief onboarding and employee training, the customer service team was able to start chatting with customers immediately.
The success of the service team’s chat support is reflected in two ways: the consistently high customer satisfaction rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars, and the preference of customers and prospective travelers for the chat channel. “Our users are now so accustomed to chatting that the number of calls is decreasing while the number of chats is increasing,” says a customer service representative.
The TUI service team is particularly enthusiastic about the Quicklinks feature of the website messenger. Through link buttons on the chat window’s start screen, companies can link to important subpages of their website, for example, to highlight special offers or important information.
The Quicklinks lead to our promo code pages or all-inclusive holiday pages, where customers can find inspiration and book their trips. Thanks to the Quicklinks, we reliably generate conversions month after month.
Efficient Customer Support with AI Chatbot
Although TUI was able to assist customers more effectively with Lime Connect’s website chat, the chat tool alone was insufficient during peak season. From January to August, employees are primarily focused on planning various holidays. At the same time, the customer service team receives an unusually high number of inquiries.
To handle the increased support demand, TUI Austria decided to implement chatbot support.
The primary goal was to improve customer service accessibility and provide added value to prospective travelers directly on the website. The bot was designed to assist both outside of service hours and when the customer service team is busy, answering frequently asked questions or guiding customers to offers for their desired destinations.
It was especially important to TUI that the digital assistant not only responds quickly but also provides accurate and detailed answers. Thanks to Lime Connects’s GPT-4 chatbot, the travel company was able to rely on the Cologne-based software for this project as well.
The AI-powered service bot is connected to a central knowledge base containing all the relevant information that TUI has stored for potential travelers.
Our chatbot has clear goals focused on providing added value to our website visitors. First, we have improved our accessibility by being available 24/7 through the bot. Visitors also benefit from reliably fast responses. We continuously refine the knowledge base to ensure the bot has accurate information.
Unique Customer Experience with the GPT-4 Chatbot Sophie
Since then, the AI bot Sophie has supported the TUI Austria service team. Using data stored in the central knowledge base, Sophie functions almost like an independent customer service agent.
The advantages were immediately apparent to the travel operator: “Using the bot takes the pressure off our employees, because in most cases it provides satisfactory answers that don’t require any further support from our team,” explains Elisabeth Scheiber.
If Sophie ever reaches her limits or a customer wishes to speak with the service team, Lime Connect allows the AI assistant to hand over the conversation to a human colleague at any time, who then takes care of the request.
Elevated Service Level Thanks to Lime Connect’s GPT-4 Integration
Thanks to AI, Sophie continuously learns with every interaction and delivers increasingly accurate results to customers.
Thanks to the GPT-4 integration, Sophie has gained additional capabilities. For instance, she can understand context-based questions, combine multiple database entries to create personalized answers, and respond immediately to all questions, even when users ask several at once.
The GPT-4 model is significantly better suited to our industry because it can handle the complexity of customer inquiries better than a conventional AI bot can. It can distinguish between similar questions and compile relevant FAQs from the knowledge base into a single, comprehensive response. Even when multiple questions are asked at once, the chatbot addresses each one. Thus far, this model best meets our customers’ needs.
At TUI Austria, human support remains the top priority, but the chatbot with GPT-4 capabilities ensures an especially natural chat experience.
“Thanks to the human-like communication offered by the GPT-4 model, the conversation feels almost like you’re writing to a human being,” says Elisabeth Scheiber. This also has an impact on the solution rate.
In January 2024, the chatbot resolved 86% of the inquiries it received independently. We are extremely satisfied with this outstanding result.
In the future, TUI Austria plans to further expand its central AI knowledge base in order to continue increasing customer satisfaction.
Let’s connect
Would you like to unlock the potential of AI-powered support or boost your chatbot’s capabilities with GPT-4 integration? Try Lime Connect free for 14 days, or contact us via chat to talk to one of our experts about using AI and GPT-4 for customer service.