“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning”. – Bill Gates. For obvious reasons a hotel doesn’t want any unhappy guests; so a hotel manager has to focus their time to make a guest happy by engaging them uniquely! In the world of hospitality, guest engagement starts from the moment a guest begins planning a trip! Engaging them from the beginning and providing a seamless and pleasant experience will increase the chances of them coming back to your property, referring a friend or leaving a positive review (online or offline). This, in turn, will boost your hotel occupancy, making your brand more relevant than ever.
Today, we live in an ‘always-on’ world, and your guests expect brands to anticipate and exceed their expectations. In the hospitality industry, guest experience so much more than just the transactional journey — it’s about guests feeling catered to, feeling pampered, having issues resolved and building a connection beyond the reservation itself.
For example, the globally popular Marriott chain of hotels, is renowned for their customer service which comes from an AI-enabled chatbot that can resolve any guest query in real-time. They have also deployed this bot on Messenger to cover a wider area utilising the huge potential of social media.
The guest engagement you provide is important because paves way for a unique way to increase satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy which are crucial for a hotel business. Think about your hotel business model and how you can best serve your customers. When do your customers need you? What hours do you need to be available to them? How to anticipate and exceed their expectations? All these can be achieved via AI-enabled voice and chat-based platforms for guest engagement.
You can make your guests happier by simplifying the booking process and giving them a discount while booking a hotel room! Your potential guest searches a hotel room online and a list of hotels in the preferred location is displayed. Having one’s hotel website listed on OTAs, meta-search engines and GDS will make it easy for your guest to find you.
Let’s say you receive a call from your guest just a few days before his arrival and on the other end is your guest who had booked with you to inform that they will be arriving 2 hours early. What would you do? Ask your tired guests to wait in the hotel lobby for 2 hours? Or you ask them to initiate an early check-in? The former option may ruin your guest’s first impression of you, while the second option too may be less likely to be enacted as they’ve already informed you in advance. So, proactively providing them an early check-in with no-surcharge is a sensible option (which can be taken care of, by an AI-enabled platform).
You can also utilize emails! Sending an email notification just a day before the arrival can be a booster for a guest engagement and revenue generator for your hotel. You can encourage your guests to avail your hotel’s amenities like a spa, so that your guests feel rejuvenated after a long-hectic journey.
79% of the guest said that they prefer they prefer chatbots over human agent as live chat support, because they hate having to wait to get connected. To engage your guests better, you can utilize a chatbot. A chatbot can be programmed with NLP (Natural Language Processing) to personalize itself according to the guests’ preference and behavior. Also, it makes guests happier by getting smarter every time it converses with a guest; (thank you, technology)! Now, your business is available 24*7 and you won’t have to worry about round-the-clock human support.
Hence, it is the immediate need for hotel businesses to adopt a strategy that includes an interactive guest platform and to engage their guests in a completely new way, like AI-chatbot or virtual assistants. But how best can you do that? How best can you enhance communications with your clients? Well, you need a customer engagement platform, that’s it! Such a platform will assist you to connect with your guests through a variety of channels. A customer engagement system can also give you enough guest data to personalize your marketing and retargeting campaigns.
In a nutshell, engaging your guests and making them happier via a customer engagement platform can revolutionize and redefine your hotel’s customer experience and make it more dynamic.
