To Talk or Bot? Foreshadowing Chatbots for Hotel Customer Service
A lot has been spoken about Chatbots and how stupendous they can be for businesses. But, unlike other businesses, the hotel industry is largely dependent on guest satisfaction and making guests happy, where a single bad experience can put the hotel at risk. It is all about communication and intercultural encounters. In this industry, chatbots can be the real icing.
But, are bots going to replace human interactions completely?
If statistics are to be believed, 63% customers would prefer to contact a brand via an online chatbot. Additionally, 51% customers state a business needs to be available 24x7.
Well, to establish the addressable market size of bots, and the scope they present, chatbots make your life as a hotel efficient by:
- Being available 24x7. Chatbots allow you to be operational even after your business hours, 365 days and 8760 hours.
- They reduce human interactions over the phone by being built on messenger apps like Facebook Messenger, Kik and Slack amongst others.
The hospitality industry is an ever booming industry where the need to conform to new technology rises up every year. Although as much as you adapt to the newest technology, customer service in this industry is one of the key areas to focus on.
Guests expectations are high for the heavy bucks they pay. A little here and there and BAM, you lose a customer to your competitor. While you might be shelling out pounds to incorporate these technological advancements, chatbots can bring more personalized experiences by reducing human costs thereby cutting down your operational expenses.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) fueled chatbots are now gaining popularity and becoming a new channel of distribution. Due to space constraints, customers these days are reluctant to download additional apps of brands on their phones. We are all aware that the era of apps are ending, leading to a lot of businesses adapting to this paradigm shift.
Paving the way for chatbots for hotel customer service can be a good move. With the help of AI, chatbots understand customer queries and learn from previous contexts. They can integrate seamlessly with other tools in order to ease operations and escalate complex processes to humans whenever the need arises.
Introducing a chatbot for your hotel’s customer service can aid you in the following ways:
1. Increase the conversions
Enabling chat feature on your hotel’s website can increase your conversions by 45%. This is primarily because customers before shelling out a large amount on reservations and other hotel services, will have queries that are required for you to address to, in order to increase your direct bookings. A little less information provided, they will eventually move out of your website and look for the same information on other websites like online travel agents (OTAs).
2. Cost Effective
Appointing 24x7 customer service agents can be an expensive affair. Chatbots have the ability to make you available 24x7 and 365 days. This means every potential customer of yours is attended to. Chatbots make hiring customer service agents redundant because of its ability to perform the same tasks as a customer service agent would do. You could grab a chatbot for your hotel from Trilyo, a chatbot service provider with subscription prices for as low as $99/month. Although, bots keep learning with every conversation they have, queries and complaints which need higher expertise to handle can be passed on to humans depending upon the complexity of the situation.
3. Convenience
It opens up an easy and fast channel for your customers to reach out to you via social messaging apps that they use on a daily basis. Moreover, making calls to customer service agents require customers to dial extensions and wait in the queue for the next available agent. Long waiting periods can be a turnoff for some customers and they might just hang up without having their query resolved.
4. High Magnitude of Requests
Frequent queries and other customer services that have similar responses can be handled by the chatbot. You can automate this by training your bot and attend to multiple customers at a given time. Chatbots are more responsive than live chats and provide instant responses without your customer having to wait for an agent to come online and address their issues. Here again, you’re freeing up your staff and making them focus on more complex issues that can otherwise not be handled by the chatbot.
5. Lead Capturing
Hotel operators get numerous calls on a daily basis regarding your hotel services but can they capture the customer details via a phone call? Having FAQ pages on your website is a good tactic but how would it be if they could ask those questions on a chat platform with instant responses from your end? Chatbots are an effective lead capturing tool and that can be trained with frequently asked questions so your customers can get their answers right there without having to call the hotel.
The capacities and potential outcomes of chatbots are quite recently starting to be explored with rampant development in this space. With a comprehension of this rapidly evolving innovation, an attention on giving a human component and deploying chatbots at a large scale, the future of chatbots for hotels is bright.
