Now, more than ever, there is no doubt that chatbots are transforming the future of customer care in the hospitality industry. Indeed, patience is a virtue but, let’s face it, few people have it these days! Technological advances have radically changed your guests’ behaviour. What could wait in the past can no longer wait today. In fact, did you know that your guests are expecting a reply within 60 minutes? Is that even humanly possible? I don’t think so, however, customers keep getting more demanding and thus hotels ought to adapt to this new reality. To quench this thirst for instant gratification, some hoteliers have started using chatbots to deliver real-time customer care.
Having a hospitality chatbot is a growing trend and hotels who fail to implement it will be left behind. Don’t worry, we will help you thrive through your customer interactions. On this blog post, we uncover 5 advantages of using an AI-powered bot to deliver the best customer care service:
Wouldn’t it be great to have a 24/7 customer support? That’s no longer a dream!
Chatbots are replacing live chat and other traditional forms of contact such as emails and phone calls. This is due to the fact that, nowadays, customers expect an almost immediate response from brands and those tools can no longer provide that. It is known that the great majority of customers’ requests occurs outside business hours, which means that a huge number of queries is left to be answered in the following day. Of course, your staff needs to sleep, but do you know what this means? First, you are providing poor customer care and secondly, you might have lost a guest to a competitor.
Since chatbots are available 24/7, they will reduce reception workload by giving guests instant and helpful answers around the clock, so they don’t have to wait for a response from a voicemail or email message. Whenever the bot is not capable of replying to a guest, the query will be forward to a human agent so that he can clarify it. By only transferring the request when it is strictly needed, the bot is saving your customer care representatives precious time!
Ever thought: I wish I knew my customers better?
Data is key, isn’t it? Yet, hotels often struggle to find the right data to provide a five-star customer care service. By having an automatized chat, hotels will be able to solve this problem! A bot can save data about guests’ preferences and later on use it to design a tailored experience for them. Likewise, chatbots and consoles go hand-in-hand, meaning that you will get amazing reports with relevant insights that will help improve and personalize your customer care. Additionally, you will have the latest data about your guests’ engagement with your chatbot and your team!
It’s the end of “Sorry, I don’t understand” or “Can you repeat please?”
Friction in communication is one of the big problems hotels face. Communication-gaps between employees and guests happen all the time, as it is impossible to have a staff that understands all idioms. In the end, guests are dissatisfied with your service and you lose a potentially loyal customer. Alternatively, why don’t you implement a chatbot? With these virtual assistants, language is not a barrier. Since the bot is not human and is built on NLP standards, it can understand any language without breaking a sweat!
During the conversation with a guest, the chatbot learns with every word, sentence and customer problem. Therefore, the existing knowledge base can be increased and developed rapidly. Meaning that bots are constantly learning to help you deliver the best customer care service. This self-learning feature powered by machine learning and artificial intelligence allows the virtual assistant to approximate answers to questions that it has not been trained for so that it can gradually and autonomously correct them.
Who doesn’t like to save money?
Wouldn’t it be great to save up to 30% in customer service costs? Chatbots can help hotels save money on customer care by speeding up response times, freeing up agents for more challenging work, and answering routine questions!
No wonder that IBM estimates that by 2020, 85% of all customer interactions will be handled without a human agent.
It’s a win-win situation, besides improving customer satisfaction, you are able to reduce your expenses!
The right message to the right agent
In an automatized chat, there is always the possibility of having a human agent ready to step into the conversation and solve the guest’s problem. But this alone is not enough, chatbots go beyond that! They understand the context of the conversation in order to assign the message to the right agent. For instance, if the query is related to booking, the bot is going to transfer the message to the reservation’s team. In this way, the question will be solved more efficiently, making the customer happier and not wasting the time of other hotel teams.
Every guest is different and should be treated as such!
The customer care of the future belongs to hotels who can tailor hyper-personalized recommendations and responses to guests’ queries. Generic replies to problems are no longer effective because a more customized approach is expected. But who got the time for that, right? Actually, as surprising as it seems, personalization is not time-consuming. Your hotel only needs the help of a chatbot! With the right pre-programming and by utilizing NLP to understand the guests queries better, a bot can supplement the entire experience in a hotel. This technology can automate your frequently asked questions, saving 90% of the time of your customer care representatives. Moreover, chatbots are bound by some rules therefore, they will always treat a customer in the most polite and perfect way no matter how rough the person is.
Guests who feel cared for will come back and become advocates! The best part of chatbots is that they stay connected with the guests right from the pre-booking stage to post-departure giving an overall amazing experience. Can you think of a better way to increase customer satisfaction and brand loyalty? I can’t!
