HK Express Airways (HK Express), a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Cathay Group, has partnered with Google Cloud to advance the airline’s data innovation strategy and enhance customer satisfaction.
Customer loyalty is key in the competitive aviation industry, and HK Express is always on the move to acquire, analyse and implement customer feedback to deliver best-in-class service aligned with its ‘Gotta Go’ spirit of spontaneity and convenience.
“At HK Express, our mission is to enable customers to travel on their own terms through efficient and seamless booking experiences,” said Daniel Chan, Director of Digital & IT, HK Express. “When the borders opened for travel to Hong Kong again after the Covid pandemic, the sudden surge in travel and business made it challenging to keep up with passenger feedback and human resources. Working with Google Cloud, we’ve been able to supercharge the productivity and efficiency of our lean data science team, streamline customer feedback processing, and fuel the business with rich insights that allow us to better serve customers whenever and however they want to travel.”
The Journey Experience & Design (JED) team at HK Express is responsible for processing a vast array of customer surveys. Among these, they process 10,000 or more post-flight surveys each month, and because each response has the potential to contain both positive and negative feedback, comments used to be manually extracted and classified.
“For example, a customer may praise a flight attendant for their good service and say that the inflight meals were not hot enough,” said Andy Luk, Head of Digital Transformation and Insights, HK Express. “The information needs to be put into two relevant buckets – the first is on cabin crew attitude, and the second for the inflight food experience. After this first round of classification, a second round of analysis is needed to be able to narrow down on the food experience by determining which sentiments go with which specific food on the menu. This manual process was not only cumbersome and time consuming, but also allowed room for human error.”
Using BigQuery, HK Express built an integrated and unified data analytics platform that could ingest, manage, and analyse vast amounts of varied data across diverse storage environments like databases, data warehouses, and data lakes. The airline also leveraged the multi-language and classification capabilities of Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform to help the team extract information and make sense of it.
“Vertex AI can categorise the touchpoints, topics, and subtopics mentioned in each survey, pull relevant quotes that correspond to categorised topics, and extract additional information like specific meals mentioned or names. It can even do sentiment analysis for each topic in each survey,” said Luk. “With Google Cloud, we’ve been able to drive a 41% efficiency improvement in just two months, and our small data team and JED can now manage the survey feedback that serves different business units across the entire company.”
Using Vertex AI to improve its customer feedback surveys is only a piece of the puzzle to a much larger picture of how HK Express is advancing its data innovation and customer service strategy.
In fact, the airline is currently exploring the use of generative AI and Google’s latest large language models to analyse conversations between agents and customers on its customer service chat platform. From there, it will be able to improve the satisfaction rate and also speed up issue resolution.
“Google Cloud is delighted to see the positive impact that our technology has had on HK Express’s data analytics capabilities and efficiency,” said Kathy Lee, Managing Director, Google Cloud North Asia. “HK Express has been a pioneer in the adoption of generative AI, and we are proud to have helped the airline stand out from its competitors and build a stronger relationship with its customers.”
