Top 10 reasons why you should use HiJiffy in your hotel
HiJiffy is a company building an innovative booking solution through Facebook Messenger for the Hospitality industry. We bring cutting-edge technology to people’s lives with the ultimate goal of making the process of booking a hotel as easy as sending a text message. Our solution empowers hotels to offer guests a conversational booking engine within their Facebook Messenger branded page. Since the booking process happens in a messaging app, we are now in face of a one-to-one communication channel between hotels and guests.
This post will focus on the top 10 reasons why a hotelier should use our solution:
1. Improves your customers’ experience and frees up your staff
Why a chatbot? Conversation is the most natural way of communication since the beginning of human history and messaging apps just happen to be the most recent way to do it. Nowadays, using messaging apps is so natural that even the least techie person is a master at chatting. Guest are no longer willing to wait for your answer, they demand an immediate reply. The importance of a fast response cannot be underestimated because it directly affects the chances of getting the booking done or to provide a good guest experience. This is a key reason of why chatbots are so important in the hospitality industry.
From an operational point of view, front-desk staff are freed up to provide service only humans can, leaving everything else to the bot. By offering instant responses and a natural form of communication, our chatbot will help the hotel to elevate the guest experience to a whole new level.
2. Our chatbot is on Facebook Messenger — one of the most popular messaging apps
It is estimated that by the end of 2018, more than 3.6 billion people will be using messaging apps to connect with friends and businesses. Therefore, it is now clear that messaging really is the new social media. According to WorldAtlas, Facebook Messenger is tied with WhatsApp regarding the number of monthly active users worldwide, both have 1.000 million users per month. Then, you can ask: Why Facebook Messenger and not WhatsApp? Well, Messenger has something that lacks in WhatsApp, anyone can talk with your hotel, while in the latter you need to have their mobile contact in order to chat.
3. We integrate directly with your booking engine
How do we integrate with you? That is a question we get a lot and the answer is really easy: our technology checks your website every time a user makes a search in your chatbot. The rates and availability shown are the same you are currently offering on your website. Just like the images and descriptions shown on Messenger. There are no costs of integration with your PMS or booking engine.
4. Seamless payment
Another frequently asked question has to do with the payment. How does it work? When there is a reservation through the chatbot, the email sent to your team has a link redirecting to our dashboard where you can access the guest’s credit card number, expiry date and CVV (we can display the CVV only for a maximum of 30 minutes). You are then able to charge the guest in your POS terminal.
5. Handoff to a Human Agent in a harmonious way
Chatbots alone will not solve each and every problem users may have, as websites and apps do not too. In chatbots, this happens due to limitations of NLP technology, but also because sometimes the bot simply cannot have the expected answer. In a chatbot, there is always the possibility of having a human agent prepared to step into the conversation in a seamless way.
When users are not looking for rates and availability, our bot tries to reply with configured Frequently Asked Questions. If there is no way to answer the guest in real-time, we let the user handoff to a human agent and at that time a ticket will open on our dashboard. The dashboard provides alarms to ensure a quick response, an integrated chat to reply to guests, pre-defined answers and a ticketing system to mark requests as completed.
6. NEW Training Feature (will be released in February)
Just like us, Chatbots need to be trained regularly so they are shaped to tackle the daily queries from the users. To understand why there is a need for training, it is important to understand the inner working of the Chatbot. Simply put: the bot reads the user message, and compares the user message to all the messages it has — which are divided into various groups of intentions and contexts. After this process, it will give a score to the user message, and below a certain threshold the chatbot will say it doesn’t understand the message.
So, it’s necessary to assist the chatbot to practice and learn, so he can make sense of the queries he did not understand in the past and, in the future, be ready to reply to similar messages. This is where the Training Feature will come to play! It’s like a classroom where every variable (which come from different sources) is readily available, labeled and organized, so we can see the message in the right context, what is the intention of the message, and based on the intent, what is the right answer to give to the user — and we have access to this information all in one place! Since we have everything to understand the message ourselves, we just have to connect the variables in order to make the chatbot fully understand the queries he previously did not understand. The more we train the chatbot, the more independent and smart he will become.
7. Increase your direct bookings
Individual properties and chain hotels want to reduce their dependency on OTAs and are trying to increase direct, non-commissionable web business. After answering all the queries your guests might have, we incentivize them to book directly on Messenger. And, if it is not the best time to book, we re-engage within the next day. This is one of the things that differentiate us from our competitors— we increase our client’s direct bookings and are integrated within messaging apps.
8. Re-target users
One of the beauties of chatbots is that you can do individual targeting and reach mass amounts of people at the individual level. As you collect more information in your chatbot about your customers, it is possible to use that information to re-engage with users and build a stronger relationship that will lead to in-chat orders. Our smart notification system, send users the right message at the right time! You can see how it works in the video below:
9. Profiling tool
It is a fact that chatbots increase guest engagement and enhance the overall guest experience, by providing a personalised treatment during customers’ journey. By collecting data with our chatbot solution, we help Hotels and Hoteliers providing emotional and customised experiences for their guests. We are a guest profiling tool that anticipates the guest needs allowing you to better profile your customers.
10. We increase your interactions
Other concern that we hear a lot is: “I do not have guests chatting through Facebook Messenger”. Worry not, we make sure that some actions are taken in order to increase the number of users interacting with the chatbot. First, we change your Facebook Page’s action button, hotels normally opt to use this button as a “Book Now” call-to-action and redirect the user to their website. What we found out is that, if hotels change the “Book Now” button to redirect users to Messenger, they will gain valuable consumers in the chatbot. We also recommend you to add a website chat plugin. In most of hotels’ websites, customers have questions in real-time but no answer or way to get answered too. Adding live chat support using your Facebook Messenger is a great option to solve this. In addition, re-targeting your potential guests through Facebook Ads and redirecting them to Facebook Messenger is a good way to make sure not to loose them again.
NB: This is a viewpoint by Mariana Marques from HiJiffy. HiJiffy brings chat to the hospitality industry, enabling guests to effectively connect with Hotels through instant messaging apps.
