Owned and operated by CoachUSA, Megabus is an intercity bus service operating in the eastern, southern, midwestern, western, and Pacific United States and in the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec.

After Megabus made incredible strides to improve its customer experience, something happened that no one could have anticipated: a global pandemic. Travel screeched to a halt essentially overnight. It hit the emergency brake on the work that Megabus had done to improve Net Promoter Score (NPS) and lower customer contacts. Like any company in the travel industry, there’s an inherent need for instant responses to customer questions. Megabus had spent months introducing more self service options for support.

At the beginning of the pandemic, though, tens of thousands of confused travelers rushed to phones and emails to cancel or reschedule trips, get refunds and understand evolving policies. The panic led to “ghost contacts” with the same customer reaching out on multiple channels. This led to a massive backlog in ticket volume and response time.The Megabus customer service team was drowning.

The Megabus team looked to immediately relieve the pressure on the customer service team by bringing AI into the workforce. After an exhaustive search to find the right partner, the team chose Netomi as it had deep experience in the travel industry, did not require much effort from the already-stressed internal team, and could have a quick time-to-launch.

In a matter of weeks, Netomi trained Chuck, Megabus’ AI-powered email bot to provide immediate responses to the most pressing questions like reservation changes, cancellations and refunds, and lost baggage.

The Megabus team strategically drove traffic away from the cost-intensive phone channel to email through call-to-actions and prominent placement of Chuck on the Contact Us page. As a result, the percentage of contacts via email has doubled, the contacts per customer has fallen, and the previous email response time of three business days decreased. The AI behind Chuck is also improving over time, and automation rates are now approaching 90%.It’s not just happier customers; Chuck has had a major impact on agents.

Pre-Chuck, agents were providing repetitive answers to the same questions. They felt like robots themselves.Chuck has made agents feel like humans again, answering more complex issues and focusing on being true customer experience specialists.

The incredible success of Chuck speaks for itself with Megabus earning America’s Best Customer Service 2024 award by Newsweek. The Megabus team continues to expand the reach of customer experience AI with additional multilingual capabilities and use cases, including transactional through back-end integrations and across more channels, such as Facebook Messenger.