Why do hotels need a chat presence in 2018
Businesses have extensively used email as a tool for engagement and marketing, but did you know what the email open rates are ? 20–30% are opened. Yes that’s right the others simply are marked read, found in junk/span or deleted.
The story is slightly different with messaging where 98% messages are opened and 90% are read within 3 seconds. With the arrival of several messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger, Hike, WeChat the number of messages sent in a day are explosively growing. 250 Billion messages are sent in a day. All this goes to show 1 thing, people love chat applications and this is reason enough your hotel needs to be present there.
So let’s take a quick look at how hotels can use this powerful application
Targeted communications
CRMs are specialised tools to create guest personas and help drive targeted messaging. But personas to be built right require good amount of data and repeated visits which need to be tracked at all hotel touchpoints to truly understand your guest. Using Social Media presence of the guest instead opens up a lot of preference information and helps hotels target guests better. Getting users to like your facebook page to simply hear about offers is not a compelling case for them, on the other hand providing a Facebook Messenger based chatbot where a guest can ask questions, request for amenities or book services can offer a good entry point into their social domain, only because the guest truly sees value in this.
The Millennial Strategy
India is on track to be the youngest country by 2020. Millennials comprise third of our population and have higher spending potential. Furthermore, among global travellers Millenials are 23% likely to explore destination abroad and spend more during their travel. 94% of this generation owns a mobile phone and prefers to communicate digitally by text. Giving this segment a way to engage by fitting into their lifestyle create an impact and leads to greater loyalty. The future will see more economic contribution from this generation and it makes sense to target them early.
Interactive Marketing
Chatbots provide a very rich UI, it’s like running a mobile app without having to invest in app download costs. Crafting immersive experiences and making simple messages more engaging is a lot easier with Chatbots
Increase Efficiency
How many times is your front office asked the same questions like what time does breakfast start? Or What restaurants do you have in house?. Getting chatbots to answer the mundane stuff while your staff focuses on creating wow experiences is a greater return on the human resource of your hotel. The right balance of technology and human touch is the key to smoother ops and elevated guest experiences.
Hotel guests are not just your hotel guests they are exposed to a bunch of technology outside their hotel stay — app based cabs, online flight check-in, voice based assistants like Amazon Alexa etc are all creating an expectation of some element of technology in the hotel as well.
Using chatbots to catch the low hanging fruit of simply communicating with the guest can provide a whole new dimension of engagement outside the stay as well. Leading hotel chains are investing heavily in chat based service solutions. To discuss your chatbot strategy get in touch with us at dheerin@easemystayapp.com
