Customer Experience /

5 Min read

Chatbots in Hospitality – Boosting Your CX & Revenue

June 7, 2020

Hardik Makadia

CEO, WotNot

Table of Contents

Constantly changing customer expectations, irregular working hours and high staff turnover are some of the gravest concerns staring the hospitality industry right in the eye. All of these issues have lowered customer satisfaction levels and hindered expected growth of the hospitality industry, affecting profit margins adversely.

Given the rising need for streamlining the existing processes, AI has entered the traditional hospitality landscape with a promise to enhance hotel reputation, drive revenue and take customer experience to the next level.

Chatbot in hospitality is changing the way customers interact with the hotels. Elucidated below are some ways where chatbots are being used in the hotel industry to increase the revenue margins by improving customer satisfaction.

Handling Hotel Bookings

Online bookings have provided customers the ease of planning trips and booking stays at their convenience. A customer can end up on your website/search portal at any point of the day. No matter what time it is, it is necessary to be able to solve your customers’ booking-related queries to facilitate faster bookings. A hospitality chatbot can handle booking-related queries even outside operational hours.

With hotel chatbots, your prospects can easily get their queries answered through the chatbot in a conversational manner. Recommend packages, discounted offers, room options that you have to offer and more, all within the bot. Complete the customer acquisition by integrating payment platforms with the chatbot itself.

Personalized Recommendations

AI-enabled chatbots learn from customers’ behavior and can make use of machine learning with business-specific algorithms to provide personalized recommendations. Through quizzes and customer’s travel history, your hotel chatbot can offer personalized recommendations and latest offers for better conversion rate.

Chatbots can also assist hotel guests with personalized on-premise recommendations like dining, drinks, on-property activities, breakfasts, etc. Such analytical ability of AI-based chatbots can even be used to evaluate and identify customer persona to match them up with relevant packages or services that the hotel provides.

Running Marketing Campaigns

To engage customers and increase sales, hotels constantly come up with new offers, deals, and packages. It becomes difficult for the sales team to constantly reach out to customers and notify/apprise them of these. A chatbot can help the sales team by suggesting these offers on their website via pop-ups.

Since a chatbot can also be deployed across various channels like Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc., broadcasting messages about promotions, packages, discounts, and more can be done via bots across all the followers.

Personal Concierge

Customer service is the new marketing. And hotels have realized that in-depth customer service with properly harnessed customer insight is the best way to increase brand value. This is why we have begun to see a rise in mature concierge bots.

Chatbots can act as a personal concierge offering minute services and careful assistance to the guests. For example, tasks like arranging for spa services, coordinating for luggage assistance, booking cabs or flights, making restaurant reservations, recommending nightlife hot-spots, etc, can be easily taken care of by chatbots. One such outstanding example is Rose, the sassy AI-powered concierge of Cosmopolitan, Las Vegas.

Poised Communications

Chatbots are very well placed to improve the overall communication flow inside the hotels by acting as a synched point of contact between the guests and the hotel staff. Having said that, chatbots are not here to replace hotel personnel. Instead, chatbots will help hotels have poised information management and effective communications, which will further give a boost to a much capable and streamlined hotel management system to look after daily activities.

With the right chatbot solution, your customers can access the most vital contact points such as restaurants, hotel butlers, in-hotel amenities, etc all through the chatbot. This way you can provide seamless, quick, and noteworthy customer service to your valuable customers.

To Sum It Up

In this digital era, customers are better informed and have access to many options at their fingertips. It is undeniable that today’s hoteliers need to adapt to technological advancements to run the hospitality business with increased profit and revenue.

Chatbots are programmed to create simulated conversation through natural language processing and answer customer queries instantly, thus reducing turnaround time and improving customer experience. 

Moreover, chatbots can converse with customers/prospective customers in their native languages, enabling personalized, concise, and efficient interactions between humans and your hotel. Chatbots are available 24*7, which means people landing on your website, irrespective of the time of the day, can have their queries answered by the chatbot.

Well-crafted chatbots are potentially filling up gaps in the customer experience of the hotel industry. We, at WotNot, have worked with established names in the hospitality industry to develop chatbots that suit their business needs.

ABOUT AUTHOR

Hardik Makadia

CEO, WotNot

His leadership, pioneering vision, and relentless drive to innovate and disrupt has made WotNot a major player in the industry.