HONG KONG, 26 April 2024: Google Cloud announced its partnership this week with HK Express Airways (HK Express), a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Cathay Group, to advance the airline’s data innovation strategy and enhance customer satisfaction.
“At HK Express, our mission is to enable customers to travel on their terms through efficient and seamless booking experiences,” said
HK Express Director of Digital & IT Daniel Chan. “When the borders opened for travel to Hong Kong again after the Covid pandemic, the sudden surge in travel and business made it challenging to keep up with passenger feedback and human resources. Working with Google Cloud, we’ve been able to supercharge the productivity and efficiency of our lean data science team, streamline customer feedback processing, and fuel the business with rich insights that allow us to serve customers better whenever and however they want to travel.”
Building a data pipeline
The Journey Experience & Design (JED) team in HK Express is responsible for processing a multitude of customer surveys. Among these, they process 10,000 or more post-flight surveys each month, and because each response can contain both positive and negative feedback, comments used to be manually extracted and classified.
“For example, a customer may praise a flight attendant for their good service and say that the in-flight meals were not hot enough. The information needs to be put into two relevant buckets – the first is on cabin crew attitude, and the second for the in-flight food experience,” said HK Express Head of Digital Transformation and Insights Andy Luk.
“After this first round of classification, a second round of analysis is needed to narrow down the food experience by determining which sentiments go with which specific food on the menu. This manual process was cumbersome and time-consuming and allowed room for human error.”
Using BigQuery, HK Express built an integrated and unified data analytics platform that could ingest, manage, and analyse vast amounts of varied data across diverse storage environments like databases, data warehouses, and data lakes.
“Vertex AI can categorise the touchpoints, topics, and subtopics mentioned in each survey, pull relevant quotes that correspond to categorised topics, and extract additional information like specific meals mentioned or names. It can even do sentiment analysis for each topic in each survey,” said Luk. “With Google Cloud, we’ve been able to drive a 41% efficiency improvement in just two months, and our small data team and JED can now manage the survey feedback that serves different business units across the entire company.”
The future roadmap with generative AI
Using Vertex AI to improve its customer feedback surveys is only a piece of the puzzle to a much larger picture of how HK Express is advancing its data innovation and customer service strategy.
The airline is currently exploring the use of generative AI and Google’s latest large language models to analyse conversations between agents and customers on its customer service chat platform. From there, it will be able to improve the satisfaction rate and also speed up issue resolution.
“Google Cloud is delighted to see the positive impact that our technology has had on HK Express’s data analytics capabilities and efficiency. HK Express has pioneered generative AI adoption, and we are proud to have helped the airline stand out from its competitors and build a stronger relationship with its customers,” said Google Cloud North Asia Managing Director Kathy Lee.
About Google Cloud
Google Cloud offers a powerful, fully integrated, and optimised AI stack with its own planet-scale infrastructure, custom-built chips, generative AI models and development platform, and AI-powered applications to help organisations transform. Customers in more than 200 countries and territories turn to Google Cloud as their trusted technology partner.
About HK Express
HK Express is ranked third globally and first in Asia for on-time arrival performance among low-cost carriers by Cirium, a leading aviation analytics firm.
