Expedia Explore 2019: Customers prefer text conversations to human interaction

Two out of three say this is the case

Expedia chief executive Mark Okerstrom told delegates at the group’s annual conference that its customers prefer text conversations over human interaction.

Okerstrom said: “We are leveraging our platform to make our experiences better for customers. Our customers tell us they would rather have a text conversation than talk to a human, two out of three say that is a case.

He added: “The net promoter score for talking over text is twice what it is talking to a human. We have had 1.7 million virtual agent interactions and 50% of these had no human interactions.”

Each day, Expedia sees around two billion data exchanges on its platform, and in the last 12 months its lodging business has had 20 million partner conversations with hotel guests.

Okerstrom said: “ Expedia has been focused on three objectives; be locally relevant, make sure we are customer-centric and find creative ways to find new values, and unlocking the full power of our global platform.

“Last year we had 22,000 improvements on our platforms making it better, on average, every 24 minutes. We are finding ways to leverage our data to create more insights for our partners. We have used our platform to provide change for the better, but we also want to use our relationships to enact a different kind of change. Our purpose is to bring the world in reach.”