Leading software development company, Audacia has partnered with Northern, one of the UK's largest rail operators, to launch an innovative new AI-powered chatbot on WhatsApp. The intelligent chatbot utilises natural language processing to provide Northern's customers with quick access to live train times, delays, cancellations and more to improve the passenger experience.
The chatbot was built using Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services which enabled advanced conversational capabilities. With custom intents and carefully labelled data, the chatbot can understand context and respond accurately to customer queries in real-time. Over 22,000 utterances were used to train the machine learning model powering the NLP.
Key features of the chatbot include:
- Providing live arrival & departure info for over 2500 stations
- Recognising any CRS station code
- Seamlessly accessing additional info from Northern's website
- Supplying contact details for local taxis at destination stations
This chatbot aims to reduce customer service workloads while maintaining excellent passenger experiences. The self-service functionality empowers those travelling to easily access critical journey information during disruptions and make timely decisions.
Philip White, Managing Director at Audacia said: "It’s been great to see the outstanding work completed by the Audacia and Northern Team in developing this new Northern WhatsApp service”.
Northern's COO Tricia Williams said: "We are always looking for new and innovative ways to speak with customers, which is why we are so excited to launch our WhatsApp service".
With continual improvement, the service will be able to gain a deeper understanding of customer needs, facilitating even greater personalised experiences and predictive assistance in the future.
To try the new chatbot, Northern customers can add 07870 606060 as a contact on WhatsApp and say a greeting such as “hi” or “hello” to start receiving real-time train updates on the go.
Find out more about the Northern WhatsApp service.
Audacia is a leading UK software development company with experience delivering AI solutions for leading organisations. We collaborate with organisations to leverage artificial intelligence & machine learning to improve services and make decisions better, faster and at scale. We can provide end-to AI and machine learning services – from consultancy, process analysis and data valuation, to prototyping, development, QA and support.
For further details about the range of services and solutions Audacia offers, please contact us at 0113 543 1300 or info@audacia.co.uk.
