The hospitality industry has been one of the biggest adopters of emerging technologies. One such technology that has been adopted widely is voice assistant and chatbots. Adoption of these techniques has been on a rise and brands have been extensively using the technologies for various use cases. Right from hotel booking to flight schedules, the industry is expanding its use of chatbots.
As chatbots are set to become increasingly pervasive, in this article we look at the top five features of hotel chatbots.
Instant messaging: One of the key factor associated with the hospitality industry is the way in which a hostel staff or management interact with their customers. Chatbots will enable this interaction with their customers with more ease and convenience.
Most chatbots these days are built on Facebook Messenger, so creating an exclusive chatbot for the hotel isn’t a hard job. Further, this facility can be made available through the hotel website as well. Other social media platforms like WhatsApp, Twitter can also be leveraged for this. This can be further used to aggregated key communication channels within the hotels.
Removing language barriers: Build on technologies like artificial intelligence and natural language processing, chatbots can play a crucial role in removing language barriers. With guests flocking from across the world, hotel chatbots can be trained to communicate with guests in more than one language. This will also remove the burden on staffers who aren’t aware of certain language. By depending on multilingual chatbots, the hotels can respond to customers real-time, improve the guest experience and expand its global presence.
Further, due to the increasing competition in the field, multiple chatbots with varying customisable option are available in the market at a relatively lower cost.
Staff interaction: With the chatbots constantly interacting with customers through mediums like email, social media and other apps, it is important for staffs to oversee the communication channels and ensure that customer requirement are met religiously. Thus by acting as a medium between customers and hoteliers for ensuring seamless communication, chatbots can bring in accountability.
However, in the absence of employees, who could be caught up with other works, chatbots can be trained to communicate through their multiple communication channels. This would further help the employees in disposing of their duties diligently. Also, with technologies like AI and machine learning, large volumes of repeated queries can be automated.
Increasing hotel revenue: By constantly interacting with customers, chatbots ensure that there is steady traffic on the website and other portals. By doing so, it ensures that the customer stays within the reach. According to a recent study, by chatbots have increased direct bookings by 30% for hotels. With chatbots designed to respond to customer request almost instantaneously, they can also be trained to route potential customers on hotel websites to the sales team for quick response.
Building trust: One of the advantages of using chatbots is that it will facilitate hyper-personalisation for guest. By understanding guest queries, staying preferences and request. The chatbot can automate certain features like pre-arrival reminders, other suggestions like nearest transportation facilities, entertainment spots etc. This will further help in building brand loyalty among employees.
Further technologies like NLP can be used to understand customer sentiments by looking into guest engagement and then optimising it to improve end-user journey. This will further help in nuanced customisation.
