Cathay Pacific Airways budget airline Hong Kong (HK) Express is leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to advance data strategy and enhance customer experience.
The airline has collaborated with Google Cloud to deploy BigQuery, a data analytics platform that could ingest, manage, and analyse vast amounts of data.
It has also implemented Vertex AI, a unified machine learning platform as part of its integrated cloud solution to store, organise, and analyse data, supporting the various business units with actionable data-led insights.
HK Express' head of digital transformation and insights, Andy Luk said the partnership with Google Cloud enabled them to quickly and accurately analyse data and categorise them into the relevant data tables.
Use cases
The airline's Journey Experience & Design (JED) team looked for solutions to help in processing 10,000 or more customer surveys every month.
This included sorting of both positive and negative feedbacks - for instance where customers may appreciate a flight attendant for good service and also criticise inflight meals for not being enough hot.
HK Express' senior manager for data science & AI, Leo Mok said, "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."
Mok explained that a second round of analysis details on food experience determining which sentiments go with which specific food on the menu.
He added this manual process can be cumbersome and time consuming with lot of possibilities for human error.
HK Express leveraged the multi-language and classification capabilities of Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform to help the JED team extract information and assist with customer feedback survey analysis.
With Vertex AI, the airline categorises the touchpoints, topics, and subtopics mentioned in each survey.
It can also extract relevant quotes that correspond to categorised topics, and pull additional information to do sentiment analysis for each topic in each survey.
The team also deployed BigQuery to store the topics and subtopics which are provided by the users, and visualise the data.
Mok said this enabled a 41 percent efficiency improvement in just two months and also enabled them to use the insights from feedbacks to "fine-tune" their ML model.
On the production side, the airline could streamline its weekly operations through the Google Cloud pipeline using Cloud Functions.
Luk said the airline will explore generative AI and Google’s latest large language models like Gemini in future to analyse conversations between agents and customers on its customer service chat platform.
He hopes this will enable them to further improve the satisfaction rate and also speed up issue resolution.
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