New social media service has airports on the edge of their seats What do London, Sydney, Dubai, Melbourne and Bradley airports have in common? Well, they all try to answer customer queries as efficiently as possible, and they entrusted the same company to take on this challenge. TIC, an Irish tech startup, is providing them with an automated solution to deliver personalised and relevant information to each traveller via Facebook and Twitter. Digital Economy Transport and Mobility © TIC With its BIZTWEET (Achieving excellence in travel experience through personalised, real-time communication with mass audiences) project, TIC is a case in point of successful use of funding under Horizon 2020’s SME Instrument. ‘The results from our feasibility study were extremely positive, to the point where it led to actual clients on-boarding. We are now trading in four continents,’ explains Paul Brugger, founder and CEO of TIC. The Phase 1 project, which ended in October 2016, helped TIC investigate potential data privacy or patent-related issues, assess the market and develop a business model for its technology. Since then, airports have kept coming their way: since the beginning of the year, the airports of Sydney, Bradley and Melbourne have joined the growing list of TIC clients. Glasgow airport will follow soon. Why? Because the BizTweet service cuts down dramatically on the resources needed to reply to customer queries individually. ‘Our service will reduce the workload for clients who have been manually providing the requested information to passengers,’ Brugger points out. IATA award-winning software, BizTweet uses Twitter and Facebook to allow clients to communicate automatically with their customers, be it airports, airlines or any other relevant business looking to improve its communications with customers. The system is as easy as it gets: when visiting the airport’s arrival and departure pages, passengers can simply enter their social media account next to the flight number or send a tweet or message to a dedicated airport account in order to start receiving real-time flight updates. Customers are segmented based on artificial intelligence (AI) and available data such as social media profile information, passenger records, flight details and information from the surrounding environment, after which specific, pre-configured messages are sent to them in real-time depending on which sub-group they belong to. The content and tone of messages can be changed based on the customer’s age, gender, or social media influence, to name just a few. Airports who partnered with TIC have been very pleased with the service so far. Sydney Airport Managing Director and CEO Karrie Mather, for instance, said of BizTweet: ‘We’re proud to engage with our passengers through this information service, which provides access to the latest details on international and domestic flights, departure gates and boarding times at the touch of a button. Passengers will be able to access personalised flight information in their native language, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, when and where they need it.’ BizTweet includes a multi-lingual functionality to communicate with users in up to 41 languages, and the system can even be used to send commercial offers such as, say, discounts at the closest shop to the boarding gate. ‘Whilst some of our clients focus purely on customer service, others also focus on revenue, and our commercial messages also provide a new avenue for revenue generation,’ Brugger says. TIC has already applied for Phase 2 funding in order to continue their expansion, and is currently waiting on the European Commission’s decision. Keywords Biztweet, twitter, facebook, airport, social media, flight information, boarding time
