Bots and Conversational Hospitality
Conversational hospitality is a shift in the paradigm of how businesses in hospitality interact with their customers. Using bots, guests can have a two-way interaction, and not just a one-way transaction. Bots put the customer in control, using conversational human language to transform frustrating, time-consuming experiences into a personalized, humanized conversation.
Traditional Service Models are Outdated
Studies have shown that a staggering percentage of customers in the hospitality industry feel actively disconnected from the service experience. Modern consumers want to be engaged; they want their experience to feel personal and interactive, but all too often they feel like little more than a number or a statistic.
Currently, a customer with a question might go through three or more engagement channels to find an answer—website, app, live agent, email, etc. Each time, a customer has to restate their request. This often manifests as frustration, and in a consumer’s mind, a disregard for their time and a lack of respect. With bots, the integration of systems and the ability to move between engagement channels without disruption is not only possible, but it’s not as difficult as many perceive it to be.
Taking Advantage of Mobile Usage
More travellers than ever before are researching travel options and booking trips via mobile devices—more than double, in fact, from only two years ago. Mobile usage presents a viable opportunity to provide a self-service option for consumers that can be accessed anytime, anywhere. Bots deployed to mobile apps and other channels give the consumer a choice in how and when to converse with a brand.
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Personalized by Context
Bots use contextual awareness to personalize the customer experience by using a guest’s preferences and behaviours to anticipate their future needs and make recommendations or send offers based specifically on them. For example, a bot could use a guest’s previous dining habits to make recommendations on nearby restaurants and offer reviews of each. If a guest books a hotel, the bot could supply offers on rental cars, inquire if they need an early check-in, or numerous other possibilities. This level of personalization is a strong distinguishing factor between brands, and that gap will only grow as more enterprises turn to digitization.
Multi-Channel Integration
Modern customers want to be able to choose the channel by which they interact with their brands, and hospitality is no different. It is a persistent dilemma in customer service that guests often receive conflicting information when crossing engagement channels.
Digitization is quickly becoming the way of the future for customer service, and to that end, conversational hospitality provides a seamless, consistent, and personal experience for consumers. Expensive development and non-integrated systems are becoming a thing of the past; simple front-end development and end-to-end integration are the new standard. Hospitality providers that effectively employ bots into their digital strategy will quickly see the advantages in the forms of higher customer engagement and a strong cultivation of loyalty.
