With new destinations, impressive additions to its fleet and global partnerships, WestJet embraced innovation wholeheartedly to delight its ever-expanding customer base with superior support.

WestJet brought AI into its workforce to meet customers’ rising expectations for immediate, accurate and effective resolution, while also easing the burden on its human support agents.

WestJet launched “Juliet” on Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Google Assistant to assist with pre-booking, booking, day-of-travel and post-trip support. Juliet immediately resolves nearly 700 highly repeatable queries while seamlessly escalating more complex issues to human agents.

At launch, Juliet was fully automating 24% of tickets. Today, 87% of tickets are automated without human intervention. The impact of Juliet on the guest experience has been substantial, most notably shown in the 24% rise in customer satisfaction. Juliet shows no signs of reaching a cruising altitude. The spike across customer experience and agent efficiency are still very much upward trending.

When ticket volume rises without notice, hiring, onboarding and training new agents is not a viable option to offer the immediate relief that customer service teams need. When the Covid-19 pandemic began to spread in North America, airlines, including WestJet, were inundated with requests for rebooking or cancelling flights, and a barrage of questions including flying restrictions and cancellations.

Because WestJet leveraged AI to interact directly with customers, the airline was able to seamlessly scale operations and resolve the surge in volume, which at one point reached 200 questions per second.