locworld presentation

1. #LocWorld34
How Skyscanner uses Unbabel to deliver scalable
multilingual customer support
Vasco Pedro - CEO & Co-founder, Unbabel
Wolf Allistat - CCO, Unbabel
Jon Thorne - Global User Satisfaction Manager, Skyscanner

2. Skyscanner

3. Jon Thorne - Senior User SatisfactionManager,Global
• Joined Skyscanner: August 2013
• Background in Travel - Customer Service Management and Operations
Management
• Product Owner for User Satisfaction Squad - responsible for customer
service and insights strategy across the business
Twitter: @jonnyboythorne

4. Skyscanner is a travel search engine that enables people
plan and book direct from millions of travel options at the best prices
The world’s travel search engine
Tablet
Mobile Desktop
Flights
Hotels Car hire

5. • Free
• Unbiased
• Global
• Local

6. We go direct

7. The numbers
Skyscanner is the
no.1 global travel
search engine.
40% growth
year-on-year
1,200+
partners globally
60+ million
monthly visitors
30+
languages
$11.2 billion
airline tickets booked
56%
repeated sessions

8. How it
all began

10. Growth

11. 2003
2014
2005
2011
2015
2012
2013
2016
2004
Opening of our China office
Opening of our AMER office
New app
Tech companies
acquisition
for further growth
Joint venture with Yahoo Japan
Innovation, new technologies
Skyscanner acquired
by Ctrip for £1.46bn
Start of our journey
Expand to EU
Expand to APAC
First app
launch
Unified app
Our journey

12. 60,000,000

13. Exponential and very healthy growth

14. Support

15. What did Skyscanner support look like in 2013?
Raquel

16. Zendesk

17. Skyscanner’s Global Support Team Today

18. Help site

19. Help site ticket ratio

20. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and First Reply Time

21. The Problem

22. Zendesk tickets by language

23. Zendesk tickets by language – English removed

24. The problem
CSAT significantly lower for languages we didn’t cover
Reply in English
Machine
translation
Use Zendesk
macros
Leverage
internal
resource
Hire in resource
to cover all
languages

25. Long tail

26. Building universal
understanding

29. After YCombinator
$ 1.5M
2014
$5M
2016

41. The demand
for multilingual
customer support

42. Growing demand for
live chat
Customer service report - LiveChat, Inc
Demand for live chat 43.41 (3.27 average uptick)
Use of tickets 31.15

43. THE RADICATI GROUP, INC.
Email Statistics Report, 2017-2021

44. TOP reasons Fortune
500 companies
translate content

45. 75%
search the web for a
majority of content in
their own language
52%
believe reading product
descriptions in their own
language is more important
than price
74%
are more likely to buy
again if the after-sales
care is offered in their own
language
The challenge
of multilingual
customer
support

47. The challenge of multilingual customer support
How to scale your Customer Support while maintaining a lean Customer Service team?

48. Unlocking global customer service with Unbabel
● Build custom glossaries and style guides for each client.
● Don't hire more agents; give your existing ones multilingual superpowers
● Build high Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) in multiple languages
● Drive repeat purchases and upgrades from satisfied customers

49. How Skyscanner uses Unbabel to
deliver scalable multilingual
customer support

50. The problem
CSAT significantly lower for languages we didn’t cover
Reply in English
Machine
translation
Use Zendesk
macros
Leverage
internal
resource
Hire in resource
to cover all
languages

51. Unbabel + Zendesk
+

52. Make the foreign familiar
fo
r
Zendesk

53. The Solution in Action

54. The Solution in Action
Translation: Thanks to the help of Skyscanner, I have solved the problem immediately. Thanks
…
…

55. Custom Glossary and Style Guide

56. The Solution in Action

57. The Results

58. Other channels

59. Results & Benefits
>500
conversations
per month
Close to
real time
CSAT up
~10%
Recruitment
benefits
Holiday
Cover
Cost
savings

60. Thank you