Flight Centre takes off with new AI-powered customer experience program with Qualtrics

Leading global travel agency unlocks actionable customer insights across multiple feedback channels with advanced conversational analytics and natural language processing

Flight Centre analyses millions of pieces of unstructured customer feedback with Qualtrics AI

SYDNEY, Australia, May 28, 2024 – Qualtrics, the leader and creator of the experience management (XM) category, today announced Flight Centre, one of the world’s largest travel retailers and flagship brand of Flight Centre Travel Group, is using Qualtrics® AI to enhance customer experience and agent productivity through a new ability to analyse and respond to every piece of structured and unstructured customer feedback being shared with the company.

While traditional customer experience programs focus on structured feedback, such as satisfaction and post-sale surveys, Flight Centre is gaining a more complete view of its customers with Qualtrics. Using purpose-built, AI-powered, advanced conversational analytics and natural language processing capabilities, Flight Centre can listen to and analyse customer feedback from a range of structured and unstructured channels – such as emails, chat, messaging, social and online reviews, traditional surveys and more – and understand the emotion, intent, preference, and effort behind every engagement.

Equipped with this deep omnichannel human understanding, Flight Centre is able to precisely understand the customer experience and sentiment across the entire customer journey and around key buying decisions, such as service and product quality, price, point of sale, trip experience, and travel experience. The customer experience-specific insights enable Flight Centre to custom-craft and deliver tailored experiences addressing customers’ unmet needs and points of friction, creating opportunities to enhance the customer experience in the moments and channels that matter.

Flight Centre is one of the first organisations in Asia Pacific to go-live with Qualtrics’ AI-powered conversational analytics and natural language processing technologies. Since early 2024, Flight Centre has analysed millions of sentences of unstructured feedback shared by customers with Qualtrics AI, with plans to scale to additional feedback channels in the months ahead.

“While the needs, expectations, and behaviours of travelers continue to change at an accelerated rate, Flight Centre is able to deeply understand and respond to their needs better than ever before with Qualtrics. Listening and responding to feedback has always been critical to our Team, and with the new capabilities we’re able to uncover even more actionable, specific insights that can help us deliver greater services, experiences, and products for our millions of customers,” said Andrew Stark, Global Managing Director, Flight Centre.

“To deliver the personalised, human experiences customers are looking for today, organisations need the ability to improve every experience in the moment, across every channel and engagement that matters. Using Qualtrics AI, organisations like Flight Centre are pioneering an impactful new age for experience management by deepening their ability to understand and meaningfully respond to their customers, which is driving greater outcomes for customers alongside bottom-line business impact,” said Brad Anderson, President of Product, UX, and Engineering at Qualtrics.

Qualtrics is used by nearly 20,000 customers globally to analyse more than 3.5 billion conversations every year – in more than 20 languages – enabling them to identify and resolve the unmet needs and points of friction for customers and employees. Qualtrics maintains the world’s largest database of human experience data, which includes more than 15 billion experience profiles that capture sentiment, satisfaction, effort, engagement, expectations and preferences across the entire customer and employee journey. 

To learn more about Qualtrics visit https://www.qualtrics.com/

About Flight Centre Travel Group

The Flight Centre Travel Group (FCTG) is one of the world’s largest travel retailers and corporate travel managers.  

The company, which is headquartered in Brisbane, employs about 15,000 people globally and has company-owned leisure and/or corporate travel business in 25 countries, spanning Australia/New Zealand (ANZ), the Americas, Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and Asia.  

The company opened its first leisure travel shop in Sydney (Australia) in 1982 and listed on the Australian Securities Exchange in 1995. Today, it has a market capitalisation in the order of $AU4.5billion.   

Flagship leisure travel brands include Flight Centre, Travel Associates, Scott Dunn, Travel Money, Ignite (MyHolidays), Cruiseabout, BYOjet, Aunt Betty and StudentUniverse. 

About Qualtrics

Qualtrics, the leader and creator of the experience management category, is a cloud-native software provider that empowers organizations to deliver exceptional experiences and build deep relationships with their customers and employees – so they can understand their greatest friction points, retain and engage top talent, and deliver the right products and services. Nearly 20,000 organizations around the world use Qualtrics’ advanced AI to listen, understand, and take action. Qualtrics uses its vast universe of experience data to form the largest database of human sentiment in the world. Qualtrics is co-headquartered in Provo, Utah and Seattle. To learn more, please visit qualtrics.com.