Finnair: Transforming customer experience

Finnair is the largest Finnish network airline, specialized in connecting Europe and Asia with the shorter northern route via Helsinki. Finnair flies from its Helsinki hub to over 130 destinations in over 40 countries in Asia, Europe and North America.

Finnair is the sixth oldest airline in the world in continuous operation. With no fatal or hull-loss accidents since 1963, Finnair is consistently listed as one of the safest airlines in the world with 14 million annual passengers.

Legacy systems blocking transparency and efficiency

From the early years all the way until 2018, Finnair’s global customer service operations worked with legacy tools and systems. Data was scattered across these systems and customer service channels were handled separately, without connectivity with each other.

Both the customer service process efficiency and customer experience were difficult to measure due to the lack of a joint operational platform. Finnair’s agents needed to retrieve data from various applications, which slowed them down. An added challenge was the lack of transparency in customer service operations and insufficient capabilities to share knowledge in a timely manner.

To bring customer service and customer experience to the next level, a joint platform was desperately needed. With some systems and their functionalities coming to the end of their lifecycle, the timing seemed right to take the next step.

Flying into the Clouds

To achieve a holistic view of the customer and to provide an omni-channel service, Finnair utilized Salesforce Sales, Service, and Marketing Cloud solutions together with Fluido’s help.

A centralized customer service platform was built to enable a 360-view of the customer. Different channels such as phone, web, email, chat and social media, were all united under the Service Cloud solution. Automation tools and omni-channel routing were built to help agents handle a large number of customer cases.

The old claims handling system was replaced with a claims management solution on the Service Cloud, and an internal Knowledge Base and easy escalation processes were built.

With the help of AI, chatbots were offered as a new point of contact for customers. Chatbots could handle simple cases so that agents could concentrate on more complex customer cases.

A full customer view for better results

One of the key capabilities that Finnair customer service was looking for in Salesforce Service Cloud was to give customers a choice of how to contact Finnair. It was equally important for the agents to recognize the customer across all service touchpoints.

Having the customer data available for the service agents enabled more proactive customer service, increased ancillary sales, added process transparency and overall improved service efficiency.

“The average case handling time for customer contacts has decreased by 1.5 minutes and the customer satisfaction CSAT score improved significantly. Also, the chatbot capabilities were improved and it can now handle up to 70 % of the incoming customer service cases, freeing time for the agents to handle more difficult cases,” says Taina Kunelius, Head of Before and After Journey CX at Finnair.

The new Service Cloud functionalities were put to the test during the global coronavirus pandemic. Finnair received over 650 000 refund requests for cancelled flights. All these claims and refunds were successfully handled through the customer claims management solution built by Fluido on the Salesforce Service Cloud.