Based on very favorable acceptance of a single-number service that started in October 2006, AirFrance entered the second phase of its speech enabled customer care portal “powered by Nuance”. The initial set of services offered flight schedules, bookings (with intelligent transfer to agents) and real time flight information in French and UK English. In the second phase new contact centers have been set up in Europe, Asia, North and South America supporting calls from over 20 countries.

To support the effort, Nuance worked with a team of customer care executivces and VoiceXML applications developers from AirFrance, along with service provider and CTI partners (Orange and Genesys) to build a user interface that enabled Air France to replace more than twelve inbound telephone numbers with a single-contact number. The result has been significant savings in agent work time, communications costs and expenses associated with mis-directed calls. What’s more, something on the order of 10% of calls are fully automated with the flight information application, which is a dramatic increase over the application’s touch-tone predecessor.

Phase Two adds North American English; Portaguese for Western Europeans, in addition to Brazilians; Spanish for Western Europeans and the American continents; German; and Italian to the mix of languages supported. The service line continues to support real time flight information through automated self-service as well as routing to live agents for services such as booking, ticket exchange or refunds, Flying Blue (frequent flyer), Air France coaches, vaccinations (for international travel) and monitoring of lost luggage.

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