Aéroports de Lyon delivers top-flight CX with Zendesk AI

Operated by VINCI Airports, Aéroports de Lyon operates Lyon-Saint Exupéry airport for commercial aviation and Lyon-Bron, the third largest French airport for business aviation.

The leading airport in the VINCI Airports network in France, Lyon-Saint Exupéry airport serves more than 10 million passengers annually and offers flights to more than 130 direct destinations.

The company derives its revenue not only from aeronautical activities, but also from complementary services such as parking, hotels, and restaurants.

Growing demands call for CX automation

The airport’s customer service group assists with queries related to flights, parking, and hotels. Nicolas Sadoulet, Customer Relations Manager at Aéroports de Lyon, and his team are responsible for managing requests and ensuring customer satisfaction across all of these services.

Historically, the customer service team relied on a basic knowledge base consisting of shared files. However, to meet growing demands, Sadoulet recognized that the airport needed to find a solution for achieving greater automation.

“Our customer service has been efficient in terms of customer listening. However, we lacked a proactive approach upstream to anticipate needs, as well as a rigorous process of continuous improvement downstream. We did not have a structured method to optimize these aspects,” says Sadoulet.

“My objective was to develop a strategy covering this entire chain, from the anticipation of requests to the constant improvement of services,” he adds.

How Lyon Airports reaches target perception

In order to anticipate needs, respond efficiently to requests, and continuously improve customer satisfaction, Aéroports de Lyon selected the Zendesk platform with AI functionality, in partnership with Synolia.

For Sadoulet, a customer service solution goes beyond just responding to incoming queries. It should aim to reduce tickets through self-service tools such as AI agents and a robust knowledge base, while also enabling the monitoring of service quality indicators.

From the beginning of the project, implementing features such as response automation has made ticket management easier.

For example, if somebody wants to change or cancel their parking reservation, customer service now has a pre-filled response template, which even automates some fields to be completed, saving time.

“Automating repetitive tasks, such as providing business hours over the phone, allows us to allocate resources to more meaningful customer interactions,” says Sadoulet. “This way, we reserve our agents to deal with real issues, on which they bring real added value.”

Digital tools drive CX transformation

Aéroports de Lyon selected Synolia to support a highly customized integration of Zendesk, from the implementation of the initial functionalities to more complex projects such as SMS management and the development of an AI agent.

“Zendesk is a solution that is perfectly suited to our organization,” shares Sadoulet. “It is an omnichannel ticketing solution, which allows all requests to be processed in one place and which offers a statistical basis conducive to continuous improvement,” shares Sadoulet.

Additionally, the ease of Zendesk integration with the airport’s third-party systems, such as Salesforce CRM, its e-commerce (Magento) and FAQ sites, along with the AI agent, have reinforced the overall efficiency of the CX platform. When information is modified, it can be automatically updated across these distribution channels.

“I recommend Zendesk and Synolia to all organizations that want to create a powerful and scalable listening entity in just a few clicks,” offers Sadoulet. “For us, the tool continues to prove its effectiveness.”

“With Zendesk, we can generate an idea, organize a workshop, test it in a sandbox environment, and quickly implement it,” he adds. “Whereas for other solutions, hours of external support or configuration are required.”

The project report

Today, Zendesk is a core part of the broader information system at Aéroports de Lyon. Although the tool is not directly accessible to employees outside the CX team, many rely on it to access the knowledge base, track the progress of customer requests, and analyze statistics to support decision making.

Zendesk’s AI features are a valuable aid in personalizing customer journeys. AI facilitates the analysis of data and mines customer conversations to identify the most cited themes and the most frequently asked questions. The data output then helps automate even more responses to routine customer questions.

Zendesk: the customer service agent’s best friend

Sadoulet sees real potential with AI to support his approach for continuous improvement of service.

“Customers increasingly expect us to know their profile and their habits. It’s up to us to follow the movement to provide them with a personalized relationship.”

Going forward, Sadoulet plans to implement additional AI features in Zendesk to gain deeper insights into customer expectations and enhance his CX team’s efficiency to even greater heights.