Help Center
From old help articles to Gen AI summaries that provide help to travelers across the world. Technology is always evolving and so should the way we deliver support to customers.
Jul 2022 - Dec 2024
TLDR
We built a GenAI summarization component for the Expedia Help Center. Our previous search had no natural language understanding and could not source our help articles for summarization. We also built and tested a prototype that introduced summarization and personalization for authenticated users.
My Role
I lead the first design effort to bring Generative AI to Expedia Help Center travelers. Together we built a question/summary component that allows users to get quick answers to their travel questions. We also provided a personalized experience by allowing travelers to access their trips and bookings. The first launch is already live on Orbitz, Cheap Tickets, Hotels.com, and Travelocity. The rollout of the primary Expedia Help Center GenAI component will be released in 2024.
What
In 2023 Expedia Group explored the way we could help travelers with Chat GPT. Its results were fascinating with lots of pros and cons. As the Help Center team, we wanted to take travel planning a step further and use GenAI to source our help articles and pull out the most relevant content to better assist our travelers, especially throughout the post-booking phase. We hypothesized that by offering more useful content for non-authenticated users and personalized content for authenticated users we would see an increase in self-service and customer loyalty rate.
Why
Fifteen percent of all service attempts can be attributed to the Help Center page for a dominant leader in the travel industry. It is a key landing page for customers using search (like Google) to access customer service with an anticipated 40 million+ visits annually. Help Center must provide relevant information and self-service options while also making it easily discoverable to customers who engage with our applications. Inefficient traveler service leads to multiple service attempts, additional inquiries about a booking or account, and follow-up contacts which costs the business revenue and loyalty.
How
Currently Help Center is not easily navigatable on mobile devices. We wanted to build a prototype for mobile that would test our assumptions about the summary component and lessen the cognitive load of users so that we could narrow in and get specific about the features we wanted to test. We did a usability test with 7 testers who had booked at least one trip through Expedia. We prompted the testers by either telling them to check their refund, cancel a booking, or change a booking. We encouraged the users to think a loud as they completed the tasks.
What we learned
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Travelers felt comfortable and assured when reading the summary before they took action on one of the buttons
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Travelers were delighted to see their upcoming trips
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Content sourced from the articles "seemed weird". Content needs to be updated to fit the new GenAI component
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Travelers felt unsure about clicking on the action buttons