FIGARODIGITAL.CO.UK
STEVEN GUTIERREZ
Digital Comms Team Manager, Transport for London
The TfL TravelBot: Usability, Accessibility, And Empowerment
Figaro Digital spoke to Steve Gutierrez, Digital Comms Team Manager at TfL, to fi nd out how the organisation is successfully using AI to increase effi ciency and improve customer experience.
T
he main function of TfL's TravelBot is to answer simple travel enquiries. “We have a lot of
customers on social media asking quite simple questions; the bot makes it easy to self-serve, and allows customers to fi nd out the information for themselves,” says Gutierrez. This is a win-win, because it provides customers with a faster service, and frees up the time of customer service agents to answer more complex issues. “At the moment, if there’s disruption on the Circle line for example, there will be hundreds of tweets asking about the latest status. Agents can’t reply on a one to one basis in such a short space of time, whereas the bot can help thousands of people at once if it needs to.” Allowing people to self-serve on a
platform that they are already very active on was another key element of the bot’s development. “We know the majority of people in London use the Facebook platform and spend a huge amount of time in that space, and we wanted to make the information available in a really friendly way, in a space where customers are already spending a lot of their time.” Self-service is something TfL is
promoting more widely across its services, and it encourages customers to use tools such as Journey Planner. “Whenever we see an opportunity to promote self-service we are working hard to increase awareness - we want our agents more focussed on the problems that require greater thought process than just travel disruption,” says Gutierrez.
Breaking Barriers: A Conversational Bot
The TfL TravelBot has been designed to suit the modern audience, who prefer to use conversational language when engaging with a bot, rather than formal text patterns. “We learnt from a year of user interaction on our Twitter bots that people like to use their own language, and don’t want to use specifi c commands. So we incorporated a layer of AI in the TravelBot that does natural language processing. It can learn as people use colloquial terms, shortcuts and nicknames – it allows the technology to fi gure that out itself, and understand the intent from keywords.” This means the barrier is massively reduced, particularly if English isn’t a customer’s fi rst language. Looking to the future, TfL is also
looking to make the bot easier to use in everyday life, by allowing people to add it to their group conversations on Facebook Messenger. “A group chat can have a passive bot participating in the conversation when it’s useful such as providing travel updates – this will work really well when friends are trying to meet up, or with sports or music communities.”
Responding To Customer Behaviour: Information When They Want It
Although the TravelBot is currently available to use, the launch was a deliberately quiet one. “Putting the TravelBot out into the wild has allowed us to refi ne it, fi x
bugs, and really understand what our next priorities need to be; the ultimate test is to have real customers using it, which is what we’re paying attention to at the moment. We made hundreds of refi nements and changes to the bot within the fi rst few weeks.” This approach was taken in order to ensure the user experience is as good as it can be ahead of further promotion. “One of the things we were clear about was that if users get stung by a bad experience, they don’t tend to go back. So we wanted to roll the bot out gently, to ensure that the bulk of users we receive over the next few months when we promote it properly will have a better experience, and will be more likely to be repeat users.” By rolling out the TravelBot slowly, and taking time to iron out problems, TfL are creating a service that is user-focussed and will only improve with time. This is a tool that will help people with daily travel issues, in a space that is already widely used. In one tap, customers can move between chatting to a friend to asking the bot about a bus timetable; this ease of use is refl ected in the natural language processing of the technology that allows people to use conversational language when engaging with it. All in all, this bot looks set to reduce commuter headaches and make London travel a more seamless, informative experience.
tfl
.gov.uk
30 issue 31 spring 2018
Words: Ellen McHale
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