November 19, 2020

How KMP Digitata and AGS Are Using Technology to Revolutionise the Airport Experience

KMP Digitata have been working with AGS (Aberdeen, Glasgow, Southampton) airports since 2014 on their digital transformation strategy. AGS’ main aim is to create a world-class, frictionless digital experience.

How they are using digital to help their passengers

Airport timeline

The timeline changes depending on where you are in the passenger life cycle. There are lots of different touchpoints for travellers – airlines, airports, hotels, etc – and all have a different relationship with the customer, so you’ve got to make sure you’re giving the right information, at the right time, to the right person, and it’s got to be instantaneous.

In 2017, AGS worked with KMP Digitata to successfully roll out this timeline, which encourages users to give their location (in a GDPR compliant way), and with that they were able to provide the correct information to passengers at the right point of the journey.

But now AGS want to take things to the next level – with AI automation and voice/chatbots becoming the norm, people are increasingly wanting to engage with these technologies, so they want to be ready for that.

Voice and chatbots

KMP Digitata have been working with AGS on delivering a natural language processing chatbot across multiple platforms for Glasgow Airport. It was important for AGS to tap into this technology because passengers want answers to be ready for them “on tap”, 24/7/365, and it’s not feasible to have staffing available on that level. The bot, which is currently available on Alexa and Google Nest devices, delivers live departures and arrivals information, as well as a range of other uses including querying live lost property information, security wait times, and COVID-19 specific information.

They didn’t want to create something in isolation but that worked with the wider infrastructure so they can instantly make updates or changes that would take effect on any platform – basically any API-based architecture that can accept it. They looked at what questions customer service are asked most often as well as data from the website, feedback from social media, etc, as a springboard for the kinds of information they should be inputting to the technology. Customers can be on any device and pick up the conversation with the chatbot on another device.

Once usage data has been collected from the new NLP chatbot applications, this data will be used to make improvements, and then expand the offering to both Aberdeen and Southampton airports.

The impact of COVID-19

The coronavirus pandemic and the ensuing lockdown has added another layer of complexity to the passenger journey, but it was also an opportunity to take stock of what was on their roadmap and enabled them to accelerate certain projects due to the extra time. That means that now they are in a strong position digitally because they’ve been able to bring key projects forward. Now more than ever, people are anxious to travel, and so they’ve received so many questions about face coverings, parking, social distancing, etc, that need to be answered in a timely manner – and the best way to do that is digitally.

However, the impact on duty free, etc, will be interesting and they will be looking at technologies that can help with that in the future, taking the passenger experience to the next level.