Elevating lifetime relationships with an innovative customer experience platform

Cathay Pacific is one of the world’s largest international airlines. With a 76-year history in aviation, the airline provides flights to over 200 global destinations across Asia, Australia, North America, Europe and Africa. The company aspires to build lifetime relationships by delivering world-class customer care. Cathay Pacific views customer experience as central to its brand identity and has embarked on a journey to modernize its contact centre solution.

Soaring into the future with an all-in-one CX platform

The Cathay Pacific vision is to become one of the world’s greatest service brands. With the rise of digital engagements during the COVID-19 pandemic, Cathay Pacific deployed a unified system with omnichannel capabilities using Genesys Cloud to better accommodate the changes in how its customers engage.

The New Contact Centre Solution Project was launched as a result of its search for enterprise-grade contact centre functionalities with high scalability and flexibility. Genesys Cloud met the airline’s specifications — providing a single command and control centre to drive better consistency to the customer experience with its highly extensible design that can integrate various services through its mature partner ecosystem.

In partnership with Accenture, Cathay Pacific transitioned 10 of their global customer care sites to the cloud in three phases over the course of a year. It performed these cutovers site-by-site to ensure minimal impact on its overall contact centre operations. This brought together multiple, siloed contact centres into one to maximise its resources worldwide and roll out innovative capabilities — including digital and self-service — consistently across its locations. Now the project team is working on extending the same solution to the airline’s outsourced customer care sites to bring the entire community onto the same technological platform for the first time.

“Providing a resilient platform to our customer care team and enabling our people to handle customer inquires using their preferred channels and methods are key capabilities in our technology blueprint,” said Kenneth Lee, General Manager, IT Solutions at Cathay Pacific. “The completion of this implementation marks a major milestone in our technology modernisation journey.”

Enhancing the end-to-end customer journey

For Cathay Pacific to achieve its customer experience vision, it was critical to deliver an omnichannel experience to its customers. Before moving to Genesys from a legacy cloud-based system, its channels were siloed. Because of this, agents struggled to navigate multiple screens when answering customer inquiries. The agents also had limited information about the caller’s intent — and couldn’t deliver a frictionless journey.

The Genesys solution provides Cathay Pacific with a 360-degree view of its customers by consolidating more than 10 customer channels (varying by location) including voice, email, webchat and social messaging channels like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat and LINE into a single platform. Improving agent productivity with a one-click login, it provides agents with a complete view of the end-to-end customer journey. Customers can initiate conversations in one channel and seamlessly complete them on another channel without repeating information. Agents can use Smart Agent Assist to obtain customer profiles and relevant prompts on the fly, allowing them to personalise interactions and resolve inquiries more efficiently.

“We see customers reaching out to us through our digital platforms more, leading to higher adoption rates of digital channels,” said Selena Yeung, Customer Contact Specialist, Hong Kong at Cathay Pacific.

In fact, Cathay Pacific saw a 16-point increase in the use of digital channels — improving from 20% to 36% — of the overall contact centre volume in the last quarter of 2021 compared to the same period in 2020.

The Google Cloud Contact Center AI (CCAI) integration into the Genesys Cloud platform also gives Cathay Pacific the flexibility to create self-service journeys that alleviate inbound calls by addressing simple inquiries with a voicebot powered by Google Cloud Dialogflow. For inquiries that can’t be solved using the voice-activated IVR, customers are routed to the next available agent.

“Implementing a new solution is never an easy feat, but the smooth roll-out of Genesys Cloud across our various customer care sites goes to show the effort from the project team really did pay off,” said Justin Yu, Head of Planning and Business Improvement for Cathay Pacific Customer Care. “Since the implementation, agent feedback has been very positive around the omnichannel experience we now offer. Together with the new Smart Agent Assist capability, the team is able to be more customer-centric in handling inquiries coming our way.”

Driving operational efficiency and employee engagement

One of the key benefits of adopting Genesys Cloud is its ability to scale up and down based on the volume of customer inquiries, as well as to route calls to the agent most equipped to handle the inquiry. The platform also enhanced the Cathay Pacific workforce scheduling system by unifying disparate resource pools.

Now with Genesys Workforce Engagement Management, it is much easier to adjust shift changes and monitor staff adherence – improving the company’s contact centre agility. And the solution ensures an efficient workload distribution across the airline’s four main contact centre hubs in Hong Kong, mainland China, Europe and India. As a result of consolidating to a single customer and employee experience platform, Cathay Pacific witnessed a tremendous improvement in agent productivity. The number of contacts each agent handles per hour has increased by 89%, and the much improved productivity has also translated into a 37% reduction in cost per contact.*

The all-in-one platform has helped increase operational efficiency and raise employee engagement. Access to real-time data allows the contact centre supervisors to monitor agent performance and easily provide support whenever it’s needed. And, agents get reminded of pending tasks.

“The countdown function alerts agents to reply to customer queries within a certain period, promoting agent accountability,” said Yeung.

From enhancing customer experience to boosting agent productivity and operational excellence, the all-in-one Genesys Cloud platform in partnership with Accenture excels — and it’s a fundamental building block of the Cathay Pacific customer care transformation. The airline is confident and ready to outperform even the best of its pre-pandemic days.

*Represents metrics collected from the fourth quarter of 2021 using Genesys Cloud compared to the fourth quarter of 2020 when Cathay Pacific was still using their legacy system.