Process Overview

The airline handled passenger notifications using a notification tool - 15below wherein the templates for SMS and emails were created and maintained. During IROPs situation, the Operations Control Center (OCC) sends out disrupted flight(s) details to the customer support team who inform the passengers. The notifications regarding flight disruption were sent to passengers in the form of SMS & Emails using the defined fixed templates manually.

Automation Need

• It was a complex process, and the customer support team took about 30-45 minutes to relay one notification message to the affected passengers.
• The time-consuming task was the conversion of Date Time for STD, STA, ETD and ETA as per the flight’s origin station time zone for each case. Since it was a critical information, there was a low tolerance for any discrepancy or errors in the message.
• The airline wanted to reduce the time taken to notify the passenger of the delay or change while also ensuring no errors in the message.

About the Client

The client is a low-cost Asian airline headquartered at Singapore, providing medium and long-haul routes predominantly to China and India. The airline is ranked in the Top 10 of the ‘World’s Best Low-Cost Airlines’ in 2015 and 2018 by Skytrax.

Solution

IGT Solutions (IGT) team engaged with the client into an RPA Proof of Concept (POC) built as part of technology exploration and demonstration.

• A Bot was configured to automate the process of generating and sending notifications to passengers during IROP situations. It extracted flight information from the email received using regular expressions, transformed data for time conversion required for further processing which was used to prepare an input excel.
• Bot fetched the list of passengers affected by the flight disruption from the 15below tool using the flight number.
• Bot created SMS & Email messages using available templates in the tool basis defined business rules and category of disruption. After editing the messages by placing the relevant information like converted times for STD, STA, ETD and ETA, flight number etc., Bot sent these messages to the relevant passenger list.
• The Bot was successfully tested with any fallouts being notified to the customer support team as exceptions to be processed manually.

Benefits

• Up to 40 % Reduction in processing time
• Improvement in CSAT due to availability of information without much delays
• Improved Quality & Accuracy: Bots generated messages with zero errors
• Increased Compliance: Activity audit trail facilitating process audits and better compliance

Applications in Scope

• 15below Communication Tool
• MS Outlook
• MS Excel

Automation Tool Partner

• UiPath