Ctrip IM+ Customer Service System: Architecture, Challenges, and Solutions

With China’s booming tourism industry, more travelers choose Ctrip for fast, high‑quality services, but they also demand instant, convenient support when unexpected issues arise during trips, especially abroad.

This massive user base pushes Ctrip’s basic business call‑center team to extend internet technology advantages into traditional customer service, aiming to provide seamless, efficient online assistance.

Current internet‑based customer service models fall into two categories: real‑time voice calls (e.g., Ctrip, China Telecom) and instant messaging (e.g., Taobao, JD). Each has strengths—voice offers immediate feedback, while messaging provides richer media—but both can fail in specific scenarios such as overseas emergencies or when users need to share evidence like screenshots during a call.

To address these gaps, Ctrip launched the IM+ system, a full‑media, multi‑channel platform that merges real‑time communication and instant messaging, enabling users to switch among traditional phone, VoIP, and chat while preserving a complete service history.

Platform advantages:

Unified voice and chat routing ensures the same user is connected to the most appropriate agent, reducing repeated issue descriptions.

Comprehensive historical service traces allow agents to quickly understand user needs.

Users can freely switch among pure phone, free VoIP, and online chat, improving efficiency and experience.

VOIP outbound calls help agents reach overseas users whose phones are unavailable, enabling rapid issue resolution such as flight change notifications.

The IM+ system is built on a hybrid architecture that embeds a native application framework (Windows/Linux) with a WebKit container, allowing native code to handle OS and telephone switch communications while the WebKit component renders the UI and controls telephony functions.

Key implementation challenges include publishing and updating the agent application, coupling voice functions with business logic, matching unlimited user requests to limited agent resources, supporting diverse routing rules, and seamlessly integrating real‑time voice with instant messaging.

To solve these, Ctrip separates the routing service into a stateless, cluster‑deployed allocation service and a stateful agent‑status service that maintains long‑lived connections with agents. The allocation service processes routing requests without bottlenecks, while the status service pushes assignments to agents.

Routing logic is abstracted into four dimensions—conditions, actions, goals, and order—forming scriptable strategies executed by the open‑source Drools rule engine, allowing dynamic, code‑free updates.

Finally, IM+ unifies communication channels by treating every request—whether initiated via instant message or phone—as a single session identified by user ID and service type, ensuring agents see only one conversation per user, eliminating fragmented interactions.