Choice Hotels Deflects 94.7% of Incoming Calls with AI

Choice Hotels is a leading global hotel company with over 7,000 locations in upwards of 40 countries and territories. They strive to provide business and leisure travelers alike with high-quality, high-value lodging from up-scale to extended stay and economy options. 

Problem

Choice Hotels was an early adopter of AI technology—a necessary innovation, with so many customers and locations worldwide. 

However, they wanted to provide a more personalized, seamless experience to their customers. Sometimes, their IVA would hear the wrong information or even hang up altogether. It was painful and frustrating for both customers and the Choice Hotels team alike.

Solution

“Customers come at you from all directions. They don’t follow the “rules” or always say the words that you expect them to say…The Capacity team works closely with us to monitor and constantly tweak and adjust to improve the CX and containment.”

– Jason Coats, Sr. Director of Customer Care Strategy

Determined to deploy reliable conversational AI to their customers, Choice Hotels turned to Capacity’s AI-powered Virtual Agents. 

Capacity worked closely with Choice Hotels to fine-tune the IVA and ensure it was as accurate as possible, even leveraging data from other customers to help strengthen the efficiency of the AI.

The Virtual Agents are designed to assist and route customers with full context and seamless personalization. They can start reservations, manage rewards, and facilitate account changes—without distracting a human agent from more important tasks. Even more importantly, for those calls that can’t be fully automated, the Virtual Agent makes sure that callers get to the right agent skill group when transferred, reducing costs and experience concerns associated with transfers between departments.

Capacity’s IVA can even use customer contexts to understand caller intent and proactively offer upcoming reservation information customers want and need, creating a truly personalized experience. 

Results

“We’ve come to find that AI is only as good as the humans running it. Knowing what we know now, I can’t even imagine trying to tackle a voice self-service initiative without a team like Capacity by our side who is committed to the journey after go-live.”

– Pauline Aponte, Sr. Manager & WFM.

Scaling a contact center from 50 agents to 500 in under 8 years is no small feat. But by working with Capacity, DSW was able to significantly reduce the need for agent intervention, boost CSAT scores, aSince deploying Capacity’s Virtual Agents, Choice Hotels has seen significant improvements in their customer experience. 

The IVA is so effective, in fact, that:

• 97.4% of calls can be automatically routed
• Escalation to a live agent dropped from 7.6% to 2.6% in 8 months

As a result, customers can get the assistance they need instantly from a trusted source, and Choice Hotels can save time, maximize resources, and rest easy knowing their customers are well taken care of.

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