Israel's El Al is the Latest Airline to Offer Customer Support Via Whatsapp

Israel’s flagship carrier El Al is the latest in a slew of airlines to offer customer support through Whatsapp Business, which enables registered businesses to build a business profile and customize quick replies.

While the Whatsapp product doesn’t offer AI capabilities, El Al will integrate its Whatsapp messaging with its existing chatbot service, which uses a hybrid AI system that transitions chats between bots and human agents and enables automatic responses where relevant.

“The service we offer through Messenger, SMS and now on Whatsapp is part of our efforts in all our sectors to lead in service, provide our customers with maximum availability and enable them simple and convenient access for communication from anywhere in the world,” said Amir Rogovski, El Al’s VP of customer service.

More and more organizations are enlisting third party messaging apps to allow customers to interact with businesses on the same platforms they use to chat with family and friends.

Aside from the convenience factor, it’s a form of CX personalization that effectively rewrites the stylebook on how brands communicate with customers, given the relative informality of instant messaging. By allowing customers to circumvent circuitous IVRs and interminable hold times while easing phone support bottlenecks for contact centers, the Whatsapp case for CX is self-evident.

At the same time, it exerts pressure on brands to provide instantaneous replies 24/7, while the industry benchmark for responding to social media posts remains a generous 60 minutes or less.

Through the Whatsapp Business platform, brands can build a business profile displaying their website, company address, opening hours and a short bio, as well as pre-specify specific responses using the Quick Replies feature and send an automated ‘Away’ message during off hours.

KLM was the first airline to offer customer support through Whatsapp, offering booking confirmation, check-in notifications, boarding passes, flight status updates and more in 10 different languages. The airline has a staff of 250 dedicated social media agents who process over 100,000 weekly mentions, about 15,000 of which are questions or comments.

Hotels, too, have dabbled with Whatsapp as a way for guests and prospective customers to contact staff. In 2016, Starwood Hotels W Doha piloted a Whatsapp program that enabled customers to receive responses within 60 seconds on a 24/7 basis.

The service, called Let’s Chat, bears an uncanny resemblance to having an on-call butler: customers can request dinner reservations or additional towels while lounging by the pool, schedule a wake-up call, reconfirm a Wifi password, or summon a bellboy to handle luggage during check-out.

“We quickly found that guests naturally wanted to communicate with us the same way they did with everyone else,” Daniel Kerzner, Starwood’s VP of digital loyalty and partner marketing for Europe, Africa and the Middle East told Skift.

While third party messaging apps allow for a human-sounding, customer-centric interaction, brands are concerned about the lack of data collection, where customer interactions are isolated to a particular staff member’s cellphone and currently can’t be tied to customer data already stored in a CRM system, and businesses can’t always identify the sender of an inbound message.

The alternative is to offer messaging through a native app, which not all brands have and doesn’t guarantee an ongoing relationship with a customer who deletes the app.

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