How can an automatized chat solve the biggest problem in the hospitality industry?
Manual chat is overrated — here are 7 motives why:
Let’s face it, the biggest challenge in the hospitality industry is: the constantly changing and increasingly demanding guests' expectations! This is a virtuous cycle that has deep implications for your customer care service. The whole purpose of the hotel industry is to keep customers happy. But now, the margins are decreasing. Keeping guests happy is not enough anymore and it is getting harder and harder. As a hotelier, you need to find ways to delight customers, be more efficient, answer in a jiffy and provide the best customer care possible!
How is this possible? For starters, you ought to understand that manual chat is dead! 4 hours is the average reply time across all industries for all support tickets. In the hotel industry, this waiting time is not acceptable! In fact, that can mean that you just lost a guest to another hotel. And what if the query happens during the night time? Well, I guess that your client will have to wait another 12 hours to have their problem fixed. So, after this do you still believe that manual chat is the best solution to provide an excellent customer service?
The correct answer is: NO! Let me give you 7 reasons why you should start using an automized chat/chatbot to help you with your customer care:
1. Hello? Why aren’t you available 24/7?
Everyone needs to sleep but that does not mean that you should leave your guests unattended! Your customer care service must be available 24/7 and nowadays with the help of chatbots that is possible. Automation has tangible benefits for both hotels and guests. First, bots are available at times that your staff is not present and if the query is urgent, they will inform your guests that your staff can further assist them by other channels such as the hotel phone number. Secondly, they save your staff’s time, that is, automation keeps staff from having to manually respond to every single question they receive from guests and potential guests. Consequently, they can work more efficiently on other tasks.
The benefits aren’t exclusively for hotels, an automatized chat allows self-serving, meaning that guests can perform tasks on their own without depending on other people. Bots permit personalized services, that is, the hotel can save data about guests’ preferences and later on use it to design a tailored experience for them. Lastly, the convenience factor is often associated with chatbots. They provide the right service at the right time.
2. A super-smart hospitality single agent 🤓
To have an automatized chat is already a big step for hotels, but it is not enough. Without practice, your chatbot won’t be as efficient as it could and as you know, practice takes time! You should opt for a chat solution with an already trained single agent, otherwise, the majority of your conversations won’t be automatized. For example, HiJiffy’s single agent has knowledge and expertise in the hospitality industry, it already knows how to identify up to 70 different industry related topics. This means that it can understand thousands of questions thus, we are able to automatize 60% to 70% of all conversations!
3. It sends the right message to the right hotel team
Chatbots alone will not solve each and every problem users may have, sometimes the bot simply cannot have the expected answer. In an automatized chat, there is always the possibility of having a human agent prepared to step into the conversation in a seamless way. However, it is important to understand the context in order to send the message to the right customer care agent. As you know, hospitality companies have several hotels, consequently, it is crucial for the chatbot to identify the hotel the guest is talking to. With our chat solution, if the user is talking to you through your website, the chatbot is able to identify from which part of the website the user comes from — for example, if it is from a specific hotel page, it assumes that the guest is talking about that particular hotel. If the guest requests support from your homepage, the bot always asks which hotel is the guest referring to and transfers the conversation to the right team.
4. Have everything organized! No more back and forth messages
With a chatbot, you don’t have to send more back and forth messages! For routine requests like: does your hotel have a transfer to the airport? Do you have an early check-in? or can I have an extra bed in my room? — the bot asks all the information and divides them into tickets.
What’s a ticket? A ticket is a “card” that has information collected from the users in an organized way via a pre-defined Chatbot flow. It can be a booking, a request quote from a user or a lost & found question. Every time there’s a new ticket, you’ll receive a notification which will help you to reply faster.
5. Data is key! Have powerful analytics and insights
With an automatized chat you can have much more data and, as you know data is key! Get amazing reports that will help you improve and personalize your customer care. You can have the latest data about your guests’ engagement with your chatbot and your team. Adding to that, you will also have access to the daily activity of your chat solution. For instance, you can have access to relevant insights such as: the volume of unique users, sources of traffic that show in which channels customers are willing to interact with the bot. Furthermore, you can have access to the most frequently asked questions or which hotels are more popular. Moreover, analytics can help you have a detailed profile of your users!
6. Let’s re-engage cart abandoners!
It is really important to re-engage with your cart abandoners at the right time, on the right channel to convert them into paying and returning guests. If your chat solution has an integration with your booking engine, it is possible to re-engage with the user after they drop their booking request. That is when the user is in the booking engine and does not book, it is possible to send them a message! Chatbots allow you to have a smart notification system that sends users the right message at the right time!
7. It integrates with your booking engine!
But what happens if the guest decides to book on the automatized chat? If your bot solution has an integration with your booking engine, it is really simple: as soon as your guest starts the booking process, the reservation is finished on your hotel’s booking engine. This means that your staff won’t have any additional work managing the booking! In addition, the rates and availability shown are the same you are currently offering on your website.
🤖 Test HiJiffy’s chatbot solution — have a 30-min demo with us! 🤝
Just go to our website and fill the contact form: https://hijiffy.com/contact/
NB: This is a viewpoint by Mariana Marques from HiJiffy. HiJiffy brings chat to the hospitality and travel industry, enabling customers to effectively connect with you through instant messaging apps.
