Dublin Airport enhances customer service

VeCommerce, a leading supplier of voice self-service and speaker verification solutions has been selected by Dublin Airport Authority (DAA) to supply a fully automated speech based flight information system. The system is fully integrated with the airport’s existing call centre and back office systems and manages simple enquires such as flight arrivals and departures, therefore freeing up customer service staff to handle more complex enquiries.

Dublin Airport is Ireland's largest airport, it manages more than 60,000 passengers per day, rising to 80,000 during the peak season, and over 600 aircrafts movements every day. In 2006 Dublin Airport was responsible for 21 million passengers.

Head of Passenger Operations at Dublin Airport, Declan McCarthy explains the motivation behind the technology investment, “The main problem was the high demand for information during peak times, the call centre operatives coped well during the quieter times, but during the busy times, such as early morning, late afternoon and holiday periods the centre was simply swamped with calls.

“Expanding capacity by adding more operators did not make sense, as the additional operators would be fully utilised for only part of the time. What was needed was a two-tier solution whereby callers who needed simple flight information such as arrivals and departures could be answered automatically, freeing up our agents for more complex enquires.”

In order to address these challenges the airport realised that an automated system based on speech recognition could provide the solution as they required information such as alpha numeric flight numbers, cities and airports in order to be able to provide the correct information to customers. DAA researched the market and invited a number of leading speech recognition vendors to tender for the new system.

IT Solutions Manager at DAA, Suzanne McKenna comments on the selection decision, “Our main objective was wholly driven by our need to provide excellent customer service, so above all we needed a solution that was easy to deploy and use, reliable and could work effectively with our existing telephone system. We were introduced to VeCommerce, by our telephony provider, Damovo.

“VeCommerce had all the functionality we required and we were very impressed by their established track record in the telephone betting and financial services markets, industries like ours, that manage large volumes of demanding calls often from impatient customers!”

According to Suzanne, the VeCommerce system has been a great success with over 65% of all callers receiving the information they needed without having to speak to a live operator. With further experience and fine-tuning DAA expects this figure to rise to over 80% within the next few months. DAA continue to have operators available as required by the travelling public.

Key Benefits include:

- A significant reduction in the volume of complaints from customers
- Taxi drivers, a heavy user of the service love it as they never have to wait to find out if a flight is late.

The airport is expanding and expects to open a second terminal in 2009 and the VeCommerce system will be expanded to accommodate the increased demand. In addition the airport is planning to use the VeCommerce solution to add new ‘customer’ facing features including:

- Integrating check-in times and gate numbers into the application to provide total customer experience
- Provide real-time travel information and advice