Challenge

From 2017 Air Malta had a standard out-of-the-box implementation of Salesforce, predominantly using Salesforce Service Cloud.

The main challenge was the lack of automation and transparency in their processes, which made it difficult to build complete customer profiles and obtain a 360-degree view of the customer together with communication history over multiple channels.

The customer care department was using Salesforce actively, but a big part of the job remained in Microsoft Outlook.

Marketing Cloud was actively used for campaigns and mass notifications every day; however, it involved a lot of manual work. Additionally, some parts of the sales processes were not integrated with Salesforce at all but still relied on tools like:

• Microsoft Outlook
• Microsoft Excel/Word 
• printed paper

throughout the process.

The COVID-19 pandemic imposed an additional load on the communications channels, with customers requiring updates on flights, ticket exchanges, and refunds for cancelled flights, often on several channels at the same time.

Solution

Air Malta’s main goal was to automate processes and create a 360-degree view of the customer with available omnichannel communication history. The collaboration with Ideaport Riga started with a user experience research project to evaluate possible solutions for internal salespeople. The beginning of the collaboration coincided with the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. During the pandemic, Air Malta received a massive influx of customer requests for refunds and vouchers.

Ideaport was able to provide solutions quickly, including designing a chatbot that directed customers to the right place to make their inquiries. This chatbot reduced the number of emails and calls the Air Malta call centre had to handle. After successfully implementing the chatbot during the COVID crisis, Ideaport continued to automate numerous services and marketing task flows that were previously manual.