Self­-service for public transport payments: A business case for conversational artificial intelligence

Although self-service (i.e. mobile top-ups) is at the heart of Snapper’s customer service offering, customers have a disjointed experience managing their public transport payment cards across a range of customer service touchpoints, including more traditional support channels such as helpdesks and in-person support centres. Customer feedback indicates that some Snapper users perceive the process of resolving support issues through these traditional support channels to be inconvenient and time-consuming. Activity through these traditional channels still forms a large proportion of Snapper’s customer service, despite Snapper’s ongoing investment in their self-service channels; including mobile applications, the website, the MySnapper desktop application, and kiosks. Just as Snapper innovated to meet customer demand for self-service through a mobile app (Snapper Services Ltd., 2017a), the evolution of conversational artificial intelligence (AI), or chatbot technology, presents an opportunity for Snapper to lead the way in meeting customer demand for a faster, more accessible way to resolve common support issues. The successful development of such a solution will further position Snapper as a market-leader in customer-centric innovation. In order to understand the commercial potential of such an automated customer service offering, the research aims to understand customer use and perceptions of Snapper’s support channels; to identify barriers to the adoption of self-service, and understand how these can be addressed; and to understand customer attitudes towards automated customer service. Using a mixed methods approach, research began with analysis of secondary data accessed from Snapper’s internal customer service reporting. Findings validated customer demand for additional self-service options, as well as the repetitive nature of Snapper’s customer service queries, indicating that these are ripe for automation. In-depth interviews were conducted with Snapper cardholde