German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish speakers who fly Air France can now enjoy the airline’s time-saving, queue-eliminating, convenient and helpful automated speech-recognition (ASR)-enabled customer information and reservations system as their French-and English-speaking counterparts.

 

The addition of these four languages has given flight to the second phase of Air France’s popular phone-based, speech-enabled portal, powered by Nuance, and now joins French and English. The six-language system can be accessed via the airline’s main contact centers in Europe, Asia, and North and South America to provide support to callers from over 20 countries.

 

In October 2006, Air France introduced the Nuance (News - Alert)-powered French and English-language versions of ‘3654’, the single-contact telephone number that passengers can dial to access information about all of the airline’s services. Initially developed for the French market only, the service is available 7/24.

 

This service has enabled Air France to vastly improve customer satisfaction while simultaneously reducing costs in its contact center operations, strategies which have become especially critical in today’s economic climate. The carrier expects to replicate this level of customer satisfaction and cost containment success internationally and at the same time it may attract more customers with the new languages on the Nuance speech system. 

 

Air France serves Germany, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, and Latin America, both the Spanish-speaking nations and Portuguese-speaking Brazil.

 

The expanded system provides callers with a wide range of services and information all easily accessed using Nuance’s sophisticated speech technology including:

 

*              Reserving, purchasing, and changing tickets, or obtain refunds with Air France agents

*          Receiving real-time flights information, as well as departure and arrival terminals;

*          Obtaining information about Air France coach services, any vaccinations required, monitoring of luggage in the event of any incident

 

Air France, which merged with KLM in 2004 and formally known as Air France KLM serves 183 destinations in 98 countries with 1,700 daily flights. It carried year to date 68.2 million passengers in 2008-2009, down slightly from 68.5 million in 2007-2008.

“Today’s customers want efficient and prompt service, whether they wish to discuss a query or perform an entire transaction over the telephone,” says Diane Laurent-Jubin, Vice-President Direct Sales and Service International and the Netherlands d’Air France KLM.

 

“We are required to satisfy the expectations of increasingly savvy, highly mobile customers, who feel great service is an entitlement. As well as being readily accessible, customer service must be pleasant to use. Nuance’s advanced speech recognition technology enables us to deliver on this requirement, providing access to a user-friendly and information-rich resource that has already proved popular with our customers.”

 

 “This solution is a fantastic endorsement for speech technology as a business solution, “adds Steve Miller, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Nuance in EMEA. “Air France has used speech technology to heighten the experience of customers worldwide, while addressing internal issues such as controlling costs and maximising the effectiveness of the company’s existing sales teams. This application proves the business benefit of speech technology, and the value it can return back to the business in a very short timeframe.”