Bangkok Airways takes customer service to the cloud

Bangkok Airways has turned to the cloud to improve its customer service and engagement, becoming the first airline in Thailand to deploy the Oracle Service Cloud.

The carrier expects the software to help it quickly identify and respond to requests and incidents, minimising any disruption to customers’ travel plans.

The Oracle Service Cloud has given the airline the tools to improve the customer experience through greater visibility supporting informed decisions.

Prote Setsuwan, vice-president of marketing at Bangkok Airways, said: “Oracle Service Cloud helps us better restructure our service operations and streamline how we respond to customers.

“We hope to be able to gain a better understanding of our customers and their needs.”

The deployment, which took six weeks, will enable Bangkok Airways’ reservations and incident teams to track all customer cases in one place, streamlining customers’ journey and responding to queries more quickly.

Agents and supervisors can now route, track and audit emails, and generate reports to measure the performance of the incident resolution process and agents themselves.

“Bangkok Airways was looking for a system to empower its employees to deliver an enhanced experience for their customers,” said Natasak Rodjanapiches, managing director at Oracle Thailand. “Oracle Service Cloud provides actionable insight, allows quicker decision-making and offers functions to integrate and manage customer inquiries and interactions across all channels.”

Charlie Dai, principal analyst at Forrester, said Bangkok Airways’ move to migrate its business applications to the cloud would help it make better use of its resources and give it agility to address increasingly dynamic customer requirements.

“Singapore Airlines announced working with BT to enhance the customer experience through the cloud in 2014, but cloud adoption among airlines is not as fast as with other verticals, such as finance or telcos. This is a great move for Bangkok Airways to bring its customer service to the next level via the cloud,” he said.

Naveen Chhabra, senior analyst at Forrester, said the move would help the airline to “reinvigorate its client services”.

“One of the benefits of Oracle Service Cloud is that it brings together multiple sources of client information in one location to serve the client at the right moment. This will put the airline at an advantage as it will be able to serve its clients much better. Many businesses, including some banks and airlines, have started to use cloud services for customer service.”

Dai said a key challenge was to ensure effective hybrid management across the airline’s on-premise and cloud systems to ensure security and stability.

Chhabra added that Bangkok Airways would have to work to ensure the data security and data integration of its on-premise systems with the applications hosted in public cloud.