For Cleartrip, it's more chat, less bots as customer care workforce expands

Cleartrip veers towards higher people engagement in periods following AI crash, West Asia crisis

Following the Air India crash and flight disruptions that ensued following the West Asia crisis, online travel aggregator Cleartrip has raised the number of customer care executives to more than 4,000 inbound queries on a daily basis. 

“Call and chat volumes doubled almost overnight. Social platforms were flooded with over 5,000 DMs (direct messages) a day, turning social into our new frontline. Most customers were anxious about cancellations and refunds, with over 4,000 related queries pouring in every day,” Priyaah Sundaraam, vice-president — head, customer experience and fulfilment, told Business Standard. 

The Flipkart-owned travel tech firm doubled down on addressing customer queries, but more interestingly it got more customer care executives to handle the deluge of queries. 

“We added 260 agents, increased staffing by 20 per cent, reworked shifts, and extended support to 24/7. In real-time, we managed to bridge 20 per cent of the wait-time gap,” Sundaraam said.   

Team members adjusted their hours, communication was kept clear and refunds were processed in time, which overall helped in handling the increased volumes, the senior executive said, explaining the resource management strategy adopted by

 the aggregator. 

While updates continued to come in with Ahmedabad airport being shut down temporarily or in case of airspace closures of Iran, Israel, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and more, Sundaraam said that cancellations were processed smoothly, and refunds were issued promptly, with over 95 per cent of refunds getting triggered within 24 hours, across all platforms including its mobile app, chat, phone calls, or social media. 

When asked whether the aggregator had increased the use of AI or added technical capacity to address the influx of queries, the senior executive said that the broader goal was to take the human-first approach. 

“We believe that the customer executive representative should prioritise human-first approach and empathy, especially during crises. Our team effectively addressed customer concerns, cancellations, refunds, and rebookings, with personalised solutions,” Sundaraam said, adding that it was able to reduce the wait times for resolution by 20 per cent, achieving an average response time of under 6 minutes on social media. 

Cleartrip’s customer care strategy adopted for addressing a time of crisis, comes to light when AI and bots are being increasingly used to handle and address front-end customer demands and queries, more so in the people-centric travel and hospitality industry which have traditionally been people-reliant. 

Market leader MakeMyTrip, for instance, has developed Myra AI, a unified interface across flights, hotels, ground transport, and destination discovery. CEO Rajesh Magao said in the Q4 FY25 investor call that it was leveraging AI without compromising on customer experience. 

“We are obviously leveraging the technology to the hilt as much as possible and there our focus is without compromising the customer experience.  In fact, our internal goal always is to improve that experience,” he added.

Travel industry executives cite examples of that the aggregators that were yet to build scale faced the wrath of unhappy customers despite using technology. However, the need for a human touch or human interface was still a need for many customers. 

Anil Kalsi, Board Member of Federation of Associations in Indian Tourism & Hospitality, said, “Online travel portals are largely tech driven and largely rely on bots and chats. It is extremely difficult to get across to a human voice, in most help sections. Apart from some very reputed players, the rest are very difficult to contact.” 

Ravi Gosain, president of the Indian Association of Travel Operators, said that multiple disruptions threw the travel industry into disarray and did test the online travel portals. 

“The major ones are able to withstand the increased inquiries from the travellers, the issue is with small, unknown ones which offer significant discounts, but getting refunds, inquiries with them becomes an issue. There is no human interface, at a period of stress and disruption, this is really needed,” he added.