Holland America Line had a problem familiar to any company that sells a complex, high-consideration product: customers would arrive with real intent — to book a cruise — and leave without completing the transaction because the process was too hard to navigate without calling in.
The case against a traditional chatbot
The company's Senior Director of E-Commerce, Scott Pettit, was explicit from the start: Holland America did not want a chatbot that directed customers to web forms. What it wanted was something closer to the knowledgeable agent on the other end of the phone — available always, able to handle ambiguous requests, and capable of helping someone find a cruise to Alaska "for 6 to 8 days from Seattle" without requiring them to understand the booking system's underlying structure.
Building Anna
The company used Microsoft Copilot Studio to build a virtual agent named Anna. The MVP launched in three months. Anna integrates with Holland America's CRM, its cruise reservations and booking system, and its website content via Bing Custom Search APIs. The team built custom capabilities on top of Copilot Studio's standard framework: multi-intent detection, custom entity extraction (converting "next summer" into date ranges), and single-page reasoning over specific itinerary pages.
The technical decision that made it work
Rather than using classic chatbot trigger phrases or purely generative orchestration, the team developed a hybrid approach. An AI Builder prompt interprets each incoming query, extracts intent from the conversation context, and routes to the appropriate topic — giving the system the flexibility of generative AI with the stability of defined topics.
Results
Pettit reported that customers who engage with Anna are more likely to find a cruise that fits their needs than customers who navigate the site without it. The metric reflects the economic value of better-matched bookings — fewer post-booking service calls and higher per-customer revenue — rather than just deflection volume.
What they would do differently
The team found the fastest path to capability through tight collaboration with Microsoft's Copilot Studio team, pushing the platform's generative features in ways not yet documented. Their advice: treat the vendor relationship as a co-development partnership, not a procurement arrangement.
“What we're finding is that when customers engage with Anna, they are more likely to find the right cruise that fits their needs than if they do not engage at all.”