Should your hotel chatbot go for a 100% automated strategy, or perhaps a more hybrid model?
This is a question many hoteliers ask themselves when going for an AI-powered chatbot in their hotels.
First, let’s take a look at the importance of having a chatbot and why it is so relevant.
Nowadays consumers expect interactions from their brand and most of them want an immediate response when they ask for something. Not providing that immediate and accurate feedback to that interaction negatively impacts the client’s satisfaction with that brand.
With the power of AI, chatbots can reply immediately to thousands of requests and make conversations look human-like to the end-user. With HiJiffy this can be done in +100 languages and on the most used communication platforms.
So, what are the differences between the fully automated approach versus the hybrid one, when setting up your first chatbot?
11% of hotels adopt full automation. The UK leads the trend
With a 100% automation, your chatbot will be programmed to reply to a set of topics and queries that are pre-defined by you and when the chatbot is not capable of fully understanding the question, he will provide the end-user with some sort of FAQ page, phone number or maybe even a contact page.
This approach allows the front-office team to be fully focused on other areas of the guest experience as it lifts a lot of repetitive and boring workload.
“At HiJiffy 11% of our clients are choosing this 100% automation strategy and the clients are mostly big hotel chains and resorts”, explains Tiago Araújo, HiJiffy’s founder.
“By having this fully automated strategy their chatbot is focused only on taking care of the repetitive and mundane queries, while the staff is focusing on providing impeccable service”, he adds.
Among HiJiffy’s clients choosing full automation, 38% are British.
“The UK is, by far, the market that has more hotels adopting 100% automation. Even though we’re not able to disclose specific names, we can reveal that most of these clients are big hotel groups”, states Tiago Araújo.
89% of hotels use a hybrid approach
With a hybrid approach to your chatbot, you get the best of both worlds. Why? Because you take advantage of the AI technology to help you with the more mundane and repetitive queries, but if the client needs the human intervention you have someone ready to jump in.
Also, by having a hybrid approach and a human also interacting with the guests, the AI algorithm will keep on collecting valuable information on how to tackle new questions and, ultimately learn from it.
This is the most common approach followed by HiJiffy’s clients, with a total of 89%. Hotels that go for the hybrid strategy vary from small to big groups, city hotels, or even resorts. Hotels want to make sure their guests have the best experience possible and having a human agent ready to jump in when the chatbot is not capable of providing that experience, has proven to be a winning strategy.
“In the end, the AI technology we see more and more in our lives every day is not designed to replace the human role in hospitality but to allow the human to focus on different skills and different ways to bring value to the guests”, underlines HiJiffy’s CEO.
