Richard

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To try out Richard, text ‘demo’ to (+358) 457 397 0065

Problem + What we do

We are creating a new way to do customer support. The current problem is that: after buying a flight ticket, the customer faces a lot of questions on their own. Questions like:

Where is my e-ticket?
Where is my boarding gate?
What is my carry-on luggage allowance?
How do I get from the airport to the city?
Anything!

In fact there are so many of these questions, airline companies always have a huge list of FAQ on their website.

The current behavior is that customers spend a lot of time searching on the internet, usually not finding what he wants because how the customer thinks of the problem is different from how the company phrases the problem. And browsing through the entire FAQ is just too much.

Therefore we created Richard. It responds to any customer questions through SMS in real time, like your personal travel assistant. You don't need to browse through the entire FAQ. Simply text Richard and he will answer you.

How it works

When you book your ticket, you will receive an SMS from Richard confirming your ticket. Then you can simply reply to that message for whatever question you have.

How we built it

We crawl the entire FAQ of Finnair as well as using their API (for customer information) as our data. Then we use natural language process and machine learning to match user questions with the right answers from our database.

Why SMS, not 'app'

We decided to communicate via SMS instead of building an 'app' because SMS has a global coverage that reaches every customer. From the moment a customer books a flight, we send an SMS to her confirming the ticket, also beginning the conversation between Richard and the customer.

What happens if Richard can't answer

If our database doesn't have the answer, Richard will detect such a question and direct to a real person to answer it.

Values for the company

Richard helps reduce the need for human customer support. Substantially. Not only does this means lower costs, company also produces much better experiences for the customer, because now support team can focus on the real, hard customer issues. Most importantly, Richard creates a new type of relationship with the customer that is unseen before in the industry.

What's next for Richard

What Richard can do has a huge potential. Imagine Richard being your actual trip assistant throughout your travel, buying extra baggage space, finding restaurants, booking hotels, renting cars, and whatever you imagined, for you.

To try out Richard, text ‘demo’ to (+358) 457 397 0065