Ever since chatbots appeared in 2017, they’ve been revolutionising different industries and taking them over by storm. Since hospitality industry relies on excellent customer service, efficient operations, personalized services, and many different factors, it’s only normal that chatbots have found their way into this industry.
These tech solutions are not only focused on improving these aspects of business, but they can also help with many other technicalities and issues that hotels face. So not only do they make organizations better from within, they also directly affect how customers perceive them and give benefits on the outside as well.
Furthermore, innovative solutions such as artificial intelligence are already implemented into some of the best customer service chatbots. Thereby redefining the way hotel industry deals with customers and how customers communicate with organizations.
Chatbots: Significance in Hospitality Industry
1. A Great Reservation Channel:
More and more hotels are looking to be less dependent on online travel agencies in the future. To do this, hotels need to optimize their online presence and create a channel through which they can communicate with many clients without wasting a lot of money.Therefore, hotels can get closer to their customers with chatbots that work on their customer’s favourite messaging apps.
For example, if someone looks at a hotel page on Facebook with a chatbot, the bot can be designed to instantly engage them and start a conversation. The chatbots can improve the whole experience of the potential client. So, this gives them a personalized treatment throughout their whole journey on becoming your customers.
Not only will the interaction start in a good way, but the whole pre-booking process will be smooth and easy. What’s even more important is that if someone decides to book a room at a hotel, they can do this quickly and easily through a chatbot.
2. Accurately Personalized Recommendations:
Now, what does deploying a chatbots app powered by AI in a hotel means? This can be set to actively provide personalized recommendations to guests by looking at their past behavior, purchases, and personal preferences. Using all this information, chatbots can draw valuable conclusions and give recommendations that make sense.
It might seem like humans can do this well, but bots have become very effective in managing relationships with people. NLP and careful programming allow bots to completely understand guest queries and help them have a better experienced.
They can offer automated reminders, give automated suggestions on places around the hotel, recommend transportation options, and so much more.
AI chatbots are basically a synonym for automation when it comes to customer communications. When paired with such accurate recommendations, they can make a great impact on customer experience and help attract new customers.
3. Efficient and Save Time:
Chatbots have the power to communicate with thousands of potential customers at the same time. This saves both a lot of time and money. To be able to answer so many questions instantly and engage potential customers in conversations, a hotel would need dozens of support agents. On the other hand, having employees answer the same questions every day will demoralize them.
This drastically reduces their efficiency and the whole low morale might transfer to other employees in the hotel. With chatbots, not only can you answer all the questions customers have more quickly, but you can also focus your employees on something else that isn’t so exhausting. Hence, investment in automation definitely helps.
Your employees can use their talents in a more meaningful way and be more impactful when it comes to growing your brand. Additionally, chatbots can be designed to up-sell and cross-sell, as they rely on complex machine learning algorithms. This can help personalize and optimize messages to create an information conversation that can lead to more sales.
4. Offer a lot of Information:
Modern customers love having all of the details and information they could possibly have on products or services. This is why many customers will get frustrated when a business can’t provide them certain information, or it takes a longer time to answer the questions they’ve asked.
Given the fact that chatbots can take care of many customer queries at the same time, it means that they can give answers much faster than any number of customer support agents. In a chatbot database, you can fit as much information as you want about your services, your brand, location, and basically anything you want.
On top of that, many chatbots can be designed to gather further details during their operation. So, they can become even better at dispensing relevant hotel or travel data. Even during their stay, customers can ask for important information on what to do or where to find something and a chatbot can help them.
The Bottom Line
To conclude, we can say that Chatbots present numerous opportunities for the hotel industry. In future, most customers would like to book their hotel reservations online and get the necessary and fast tech support that they deserve. Moreover, hotels that are able to deliver this are the ones that will grow. That’s why you need to join this trend, but only after making sure that you are ready to make this step.
What’s your take on growing importance of chatbots? Do you feel they are as reliable as humans or score better in performance? Feel free to share your feedback.