The following is a guest post from Ethan Gustav, group president, North America, at Infobip, a platform for conversational customer experiences. Opinions are the author’s own.
Hotels today are in a high-stress position. Customer expectations have never been higher: Anything short of perfection risks alienating a customer and sending them straight to a competitor for their next stay. Worse yet, a bad experience has potential ramifications far beyond the individual customer — as we know, there are few industries more vulnerable to negative reviews than hospitality.
As hotels are quickly learning, the most flawlessly trained staff can only get you so far in this new environment. Trained by technology to expect their needs to be met instantly, today's customer can only be satisfied by technologically optimized solutions. Of these, one has recently emerged as by far the most significant: conversational AI.
Conversational artificial intelligence tools are poised to fill the service gaps endemic to hospitality. They can streamline operations at every step of the customer journey, automating everything from check-in to room service to the answering of routine customer questions. By drastically reducing the potential for stress at every stage of the customer experience — preventing it from taking root, let alone boiling over into a bad review — they stand not only to boost satisfaction but also to increase loyalty and referral rates. Crucially, they can do this while meeting customers where they actually are: WhatsApp, Messenger, SMS and so on.
Remaking the guest experience
As those in hospitality know, virtually every point along the customer experience timeline, from initial booking to checkout, is fraught with the potential for stress. Human personnel are trained to manage precisely these pressure points, but there are inevitably factors out of their control. By filling in these gaps, conversational AI ensures that a meaningful human connection is maintained before, during and, crucially, after a customer’s stay.
Personalization is key here. Let's say a customer is visiting the city for the first time on a business trip. Their schedule is tight, but they're hoping to take in at least some of what the city has to offer. Through casual chatting on their platform of choice, they can arrange a solid itinerary before their plane even touches down. The AI can make museum recommendations (the traveler, it turns out, is an Impressionist fanatic, and there's a Monet exhibit six blocks from the hotel); it can make tailored restaurant recommendations; it can even buy the tickets for the former and make reservations for the latter.
And because the latest options of conversational AI are equipped with high-level semantic analysis, they can tell when a customer is upset and know precisely when to pass things off to a human staff member. They can also do this in any language, drastically expanding the number of customers that hotels can cater to.
Deepening customer bonds
None of this is to suggest that conversational AI can or should replace human staff. Rather, conversational AI is designed to deepen the quality of those connections, allowing hotel staff to devote much more energy to high-level customer issues.
Conversational AI can do this, in part, because it actually is a natural extension of your company and its voice. Of course, that’s only the case when the AI is correctly deployed, which can be its own challenge.
In a successful conversational AI deployment, your brand’s personality is infused into every stage of the process. When mapping out conversation flows, you should be paying close attention to tone: You want to make sure your messages convey the right degree of personality while also getting key points across. Set things up so that, when the AI can’t understand a user’s query, it can gently guide the conversation back on track or, if necessary, connect the customer with a human agent.
Hotels needn’t launch this all at once. In fact, a pilot program to work out the kinks is very much advisable. Crucially, though, the learning process here is ongoing and never-ending. Even when your conversational AI is up and running, you should be constantly reviewing conversation histories to identify bottlenecks and other issues.
Ideally, you’ll set up a virtuous cycle. Each time a customer talks with a hotel’s AI, they feed it useful information about their preferences, information that can then be activated and put to use on subsequent visits, further instilling loyalty.
All of which brings us back to the matter of expectations. As more hospitality businesses integrate these kinds of communication tools, the ease they provide will come to be a baseline expectation on the part of consumers. There is a reason that the conversational AI market is valued at $11.58 billion and projected to reach $41.39 billion by 2030. This technology is already making an impact. The question going forward will not be whether to use it, but rather how to deploy it most effectively for guests.
