It was a nine-year journey to get HBX Group to its IPO in February of this year. The €725 million raised from the public offering is expected to go towards paying down debt and accelerating the next phase of growth for its stable of B2B online marketplaces.
“We went through an interesting couple of years with COVID, as did the rest of the travel industry,” Xabier Zabala, chief operating officer, HBX Group told Customer Experience Magazine.
“However, we came out stronger than ever before. COVID strengthened our partnerships and trust with clients, as we were there when they needed us,” he added.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and customer experience are expected to play a major role in the group’s further development. Outstanding customer experience for its marketplace partners is a key pillar of its value proposition. CX “gives us a competitive edge in the marketplace”, said Zabala.
“This has been more prevalent over the last five years, since COVID,” he added.
HBX Group intends to leverage artificial intelligence to accelerate further CX improvements. Although the group is looking at ways AI can automate processes, it isn’t planning to reduce headcount. On the contrary, “it is about augmented intelligence”, commented Zabala.
“We’re trying to give our teams better capabilities. We are giving them superpowers to do their job,” he added.
AI automates 20% of functions
Artificial intelligence has automated around 20% of support functions where it has been implemented, enabling customer support agents to improve response times, while tackling more complex issues. With repetitive tasks automated, it creates time and space “for teams to focus on the hard topics. This creates a differential service proposition”, said the COO.
AI is also expected to play a huge role in training future customer support agents. HBX Group operates eight contact centres around the globe, servicing every time zone and most languages of its customer base.
Previously, trainees would’ve memorised long procedures and run through mock interviews with trainers. But none of the training was standardised across the group.
Now the AI-powered process offers a richer and more engaging training experience. With all the training documents now digitised “AI will tell you, ‘this is the situation, this is what you have to do’”, said Zabala.
An AI assistant can “create as many calls as we want. We can then throw them into the [trainee] agent. The agent can decide between a hundred different scenarios, multiple languages, voices [and] multiple levels of difficulty”, he explained.
AI corrects product descriptions and translates them into 18 languages
Content management is another area where artificial intelligence is transforming the workflow of the B2B marketplace provider. It’s common for product descriptions on the various marketplaces to be written by hotel owners or managers, and then translated, typically resulting in a few mistakes. “They are not experts in languages. Maybe they’re not good writers. So, some descriptions may not be the best,” said Zabala.
AI is also used to assess product descriptions, identify mistakes in grammar and intuition, and suggest better copy. Artificial intelligence will “evaluate them, correct them or improve them, and translate them into 18 languages, in seconds”, added Zabala.
HBX Group is also leveraging it to manage image usage across its web platforms and even spot fraudulent hotel properties.
Moving forward artificial intelligence is expected to improve the group’s use of video content.
Other ideas include the use of AI agents and the introduction of greater personalisation. “AI agents will be the biggest transformation. This means that AI will go from being informational to transactional,” explained Zabala.
“This is starting, but it will take time. The key for us is to decide when we fully automate [workflows], versus having a human in the loop,” he added.
HBX Group’s CX initiatives won the B2B player, a gold award for the Best Product or Service Development at the European Customer Experience Awards last year for its Insights Tool. The group also made the final in the Best B2B Customer Experience category.