How Conversational AI Technology Can Help Hotels Address Today’s Customer Service Challenges

Newo Inc., a company based in Silicon Valley, California, is the creator of the drag-n-drop builder of the Non-Human Workers, Digital Employees, Intelligent Agents, AI-assistants, AI-chatbots. The newo.ai platform enables the development of conversational AI Assistants and Intelligent Agents, based on LLMs with emotional and conscious behavior, without the need for programming skills. Such tools redefine client interactions in the hospitality sector.

Both use AI to provide their services, and both serve as examples of what the future of AI in hospitality will look like. I found fewer thought-provoking guides to practical things that could be done today and in the near future with artificial intelligence in hospitality. This guide builds on my guide to hotel automation and is focused on hotel operators, though I hope other industry participants will find it useful as well.

Customers

Supported by a robust AI-powered platform able to centralize all the guest information, it’s easier for hotels to enable high-quality teamwork and seamless internal communications. First, the best hotel chatbots greet the guest and display the most popular topics and query categories. When the customer selects one of the options, they will be provided with helpful information addressing their request or signposted to the most relevant page on the website. Indirect events can create a surge in the need for customer support at even the most prepared of call centers. Conversational AI can take some of the heavy-lifting off hotel call centers and scale support services according to your business needs.

Deep learning is when programmers implement neuro networks to help the software make assumptions and understand the context that the software evolves into. Did you know that “94% (of C-level executives) reported that artificial intelligence would ‘substantially transform’ their companies within five years, most believing the transformation would occur by 2020”? Today, most hotels use AI-powered websites, booking tools, or other software. “By automating time-consuming processes and freeing up the hotel team to perform more complex and impactful tasks, hotels can maintain their service levels with fewer human resources”, adds the founder of HiJiffy. With AI in place, call center and front desk teams are freed up to focus on more complex issues, such as identifying special offers or comps available to guests, while delivering better overall experiences and more personalized service. Join Dasha Developer Community and we’ll teach you how to create such an app and many more.

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They can solve customer pain points, support ticket automation and data mining from various sources. Machine learning is an AI technique that allows machines to learn from experience. The more it performs, the more it knows without being explicitly programmed. Machine learning algorithms perform tasks when you feed them examples of labelled data.

It gathers information from the user such as their destination, date of check in and check out, star rating, etc, and the mentioned hotels for them based on all the information collected. Once the hotel options are mentioned, the app will prompt the customer to select the hotel that they are interested in, and will offer them the chance to book it. This will also help in decreasing the number of no-shows and cancellations. If your hotel already uses such solutions, they can be integrated with conversational AI to collect and verify necessary information from guests before their arrival. Alternatively, you can also put conversational AI to work and automate sending a campaign to your guests asking them to fill out a pre-check-in form, so your staff only has to verify their data and issue a key upon arrival.

Also, we’ll explore how it creates memorable and personify guest-centricities. Whether through AI-powered concierge services, predictive room preferences, or dynamic pricing models. Inns leverage AI to create a harmonious blend of potency and personalization. We’ll illuminate the path toward a new era of unique visitor satisfaction in the hospitality sector. Our AI-Powered hotel chatbot is fully capable of answering your guests’ frequently asked questions using conversational dialogues, rather than relying on guest-prompted action-based labels.

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Are you an industry thought leader with a point of view on hotel technology that you would like to share with our readers? If so, we invite you to review our editorial guidelines and submit your article for publishing consideration. Additionally, the technology also enables cross-selling and up-selling of services in a self-service hotel environment if the hotel has a defined path in place. This can include cross-product selling such as Room + Spa + Restaurant reservations, for example, driving additional revenue for the hotel.

Hyperdynamic pricing allows booking engines to automatically search social media, past user data, and even world news to display rates that maximize earning potential. For example, if there is a large conference filling up hotels nearby, the artificially intelligent software will instantly adjust prices to reflect the increase in demand. “After a very challenging period as a consequence of the pandemic, hotels are trying to make the most out of each guest in order to recover the revenue losses. This means that more than ever, hoteliers are focused on delivering memorable experiences with stellar customer service”, says Tiago Araújo, founder of HiJiffy. By routing to the relevant team members and/or departments the guests’ requests based on their specificity, hotels can significantly improve both staff productivity and guest satisfaction.

The primary aim of designing the hospitality chatbot is to enhance customer service by providing on-site personalised support. With AI-driven chatbots, guests can quickly check in to the hotel from their mobile device without waiting at the front desk, booking reservations, ordering room service, etc., just at the tip of their fingers. Artificial intelligence for hotels isn’t a distant dream of the future. Artificial intelligence, also known as AI, in hotels includes everything from robotic servers to intelligent computer systems. A chatbot system, also known as a human-machine interaction system, uses conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to simulate a natural language conversation with a user over messaging channels, website widgets, and mobile apps.

Whether the reader is positive, negative, or neutral, it is mainly used to evaluate customer feedback, survey responses, and product reviews. It ensures the protection of guest information through advanced encryption and authentication protocols. “Within these fields of AI, you can find NLP (Natural Language Processing) which is the field of AI that focuses on understanding spoken language and written language,” he noted. Revenue Management is one of the biggest concerns of general managers. That’s why, without surprise, increasing revenue is a major reason for the adoption of AI in the hospitality industry. Having these numbers in mind, let’s now explore why hoteliers are adopting Conversational AI as a response to the reality previously exposed.

What is machine learning?

These establishments prioritize a technologically enhanced and customized guest experience. The convergence of advanced technologies ensures efficient and convenient stays. Also, it marks a significant shift towards a more responsive and tailored hospitality approach.

• In a chat, a user shares personal data that is sometimes sensitive and falls under the GDPR and other privacy laws around the world.
• A hotel chatbot interprets or understands such interactions and responds with the best answer.
• First, the best hotel chatbots greet the guest and display the most popular topics and query categories.
• Your guest experience begins before your guest steps foot on your property, and this is another strong use case for artificial intelligence in hospitality today.
• Ultimately, hotel owners and operators are focused on increasing profitability, which requires also focusing on cost reductions.
• Although natural language processing has come a long way, automated speech recognition technology continues to face challenges in recognizing the full range of linguistic variations.

The AI technology behind it uses complex algorithms, natural language processing (NLP), and machine learning to understand, process and interpret human language, as well as respond to queries. Likewise, hospitality chatbots help hotels identify improvement areas and quickly address negative feedback. Hotels and travel companies can engage with customers in different channels, build strong connections, and create more engaging experiments. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Integrating MI into hotels represents a seismic shift in creating and delivering customer-centricity. AI elevates the hospitality sector, fostering punch and guest satisfaction.

GME’s report also suggests that the North America AI in hospitality market share dominated the global demand for the technology and accounted for over 50% of deployment in 2020. On the other hand, thanks to Q-SEO, the use of your basic structured data, on which ChatGPT will feed, is the winning solution. It will ensure that Bing & ChatGPT is capturing the right and necessary data which you can control (and only the data you want to communicate). – the second is the conversation tab with the results provided by ChatGPT.

We are hearing from hotel operators that the employees they shed at the start of the pandemic are simply not returning as business is picking up. Even if they can recruit and hire new staff, there is a long learning curve to get those staff up to speed. The rise of conversational AI search has the potential to disrupt some of the progress hotels have made optimizing their websites for direct traffic. When travelers turn to chatGPT to research hotels, for example, there’s no way to know how it chooses which properties to display when asked, “What are the best hotels for a girlfriend getaway in New York City? Chatbots were also often praised as a new, exciting interface for travel. The original vision was that a chatbot would be able to help streamline hotel searches and make it easier for travelers to find what they sought while on-property.

Imagine a world where all the recommendations were personalized to each guest. AI will look less like a standalone app like ChatGPT and more like the technology behind the scenes of applications you’re already using. “Traditional AI” is the biggest opportunity for hoteliers now and in the foreseeable future. But this is even more true for hotel operators, where the job is less about creating content and images and more about becoming efficient and effective.

There are two moments that can have a positive and lasting impact on your guests’ experience at this stage – the actual operational check-in process and a delightful welcome to your hotel and bringing all it has to offer to the forefront. One of the most significant benefits conversational AI can bring to the check-in stage of the guest journey is streamlining the process and reducing waiting times at the front desk. An AI hotel reservation system provides assistance throughout the booking process in a conversational way. By asking a series of questions in a chat on the hotel’s website or other communication channels, it collates the necessary information (such as contact details, dates, preferred room options) to process the booking. If your hotel uses a booking engine, the data can be directly transferred if integration with the conversational AI solution exists. In the simplest terms, conversational AI can be defined as advanced technology able to simulate human-like conversation.

By making every interaction that a guest has with their hotel seamless and enjoyable, hotels are then able to develop strong post-stay guest engagement strategies. This way hotels can easily convert anonymous visitors into qualified leads, thus saving on OTA commissions by increasing direct bookings. “In 2021, HiJiffy helped the 1.600 hotels using our Booking Assistant to generate +40 million GBP in direct bookings,” he adds. Furthermore, GME reported that “AI tools are proved to be more effective while dealing with end-user customer requirements,” creating trust and brand loyalty with guests. Learn more on how to unleash the power of integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into your property’s call center. Generative AI, on the other hand, uses neural networks to generate new and original data.

Here as well, hotel owners and operators are looking to technology to cut costs and increase profits. But these efforts and advancements present certain ethical conundrums. Consider, for example, how minorities are represented in training datasets—or more accurately how they are not represented. Most widely used datasets exclude more diverse expressions of dialect and social identity.

Keep an eye out for the tools, gadgets, and platforms that aren’t available now but are set to create a noticeable impact on the industry. Start looking for brands or companies you like and forecast your upcoming budgets accordingly. However, 49% of survey respondents say that the hotel industry ranks right in the middle at a grade of “C” for artificial intelligence implementation. The good news is that there is a lot of room to grow in this category. “Only this way hotels will be able to maximize revenue by developing targeted campaigns and reduce OTAs dependency by boosting customer loyalty”, he adds.

The ongoing pandemic recovery and global macroeconomic uncertainty this year (2023) have put an increased focus on driving revenue growth. AI is moving out of buzzword territory and into practical applications, and that’s going to have big implications for us.

It sets new standards for innovative and customer-focused experiences. Artificial intelligence is used in the hotel industry for revenue management, guest experience, and the automation of daily operations. To use AI in hotels, managers must consider where their investment will make the greatest impact based on their available budget, guest feedback, and plans for future growth as new technologies are coming to the market almost every day. We have seen our technology deployed across the hospitality sector through a suite of frictionless and automated multimodal customer service solutions that help hotel operators ease their guests’ stay experience.

Automated speech recognition systems must account for different languages, accents, and acoustic inflections, which is much more difficult and nuanced. These chatbots, powered by Artificial Intelligence, can read communication, analyse it, and answer correctly, resulting in very realistic chat exchanges similar to those a user would have with a human customer care representative. Hotel chatbots enable significantly more personalisation and more natural interactions, especially when powered by AI specialised in the hospitality industry communications. Let’s look at them closely to see how they benefit hotels and their guests and their potential impact on hotel operations. Hotels such as the Radisson Blu Edwardian in London and Manchester use artificial intelligence concierges to check guests in or out, order room service, and answer questions 24/7.

Hotel managers can easily track KPIs and monitor progress on objectives (Messages resolved, Net Promoter Score, etc.). By analysing all the data collected, hoteliers can find actionable insights to maximize revenue and guest satisfaction. Hotel general managers are using technology to get full visibility over the teams’ efficiency and collect actionable insights to optimize processes and reduce operating costs. But what’s more, when needed, hotels can still have a smooth handover to a human agent without affecting the user experience, providing context to the team to continue the conversation. Hotels can avoid having to hold on to a customer to attend to their request and guests are able to solve +85% of their usual queries instantly.

’ An AI-powered chatbot could instantly recognize who I am and say have 26 hours left.” That’s just one use case but shows how chat could become a new way to interface with technology and give team members instant access to questions they have. “You already have a lot of automation in the operations of many hotels, but what’s really missing is the use of AI and automation in human capital management – which is the #1 issue facing hotels right now,” Cain noted. AI creates the possibility of highly-personalized commerce, and I would like to see more hotel booking processes look more like Netflix and less like they’re straight out of 1998.

• The majority of the data ChatGPT uses is structured data from Booking, Expedia, etc., not from the hotel itself for the simple reason that it doesn’t exist with this system its not a ChatGPT for hotels.
• Also, such techniques involve personalized recommendations driven by AI algorithms.
• Thanks to Conversational AI-driven tools like hospitality chatbots, businesses now have the means to revolutionise customer experiences, streamline operations, and boost efficiency.
• However, as we have seen in article why you should focus more on google and less on OTAs, they are using them to compete in search results.

Double down on living that out in the way you provide hospitality. You see the limitations of AI immediately if you apply it in an area you have expertise. If I were a hotel owner or operator right now, I’d be incentivizing my team to come to me weekly with ideas on how they can use AI to make conversational ai hotels them better at their job and do it faster. That’s often the first reaction when new technology is introduced. In a world where data and answers are everywhere, theoretical frameworks are more important than ever. It’s an important reminder as we start thinking about the applications of AI.

You can offer guests an AI-powered virtual concierge service throughout their stay at the hotel. Conversational AI facilitates a real-time feedback loop, identifying any issues or special requests your guests may have. Being proactive and able to address them immediately, either by resolving their queries independently or by bringing them to the attention of hotel staff, boosts the overall guest experience and streamlines operational efficiency. “In these types of conversational interactions, AI chatbots can extend the reach of an organization’s customer service and maintain a level of reciprocity with their customers,” says Greg Bennett, conversation design principal at Salesforce. Conversational AI-driven tools like hospitality chatbots are solutions designed to assist guests via helpful information and support during their hotel or travel stay. These tools use NLP and ML, which enable them to interact with users in natural language.

When a potential guest lands on a hotel website, the chatbot widget will pop up discreetly in the corner, making itself available to address any queries. By this past November, hotel occupancy was starting to climb back towards its pre-pandemic levels as travelers’ comfort increased. According to STR, U.S. occupancy rates in November of last year were at 57.6%, which was still down 6.2% compared to 2019.

In the context of the hospitality industry, the impact of conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to grow in significance. It powers hotel chatbots and virtual concierges, providing guests instant, 24/7 responses to their queries. Capable of understanding the nuances of human language and identifying intentions, it can also learn from interactions to improve its responses over time.

In what the two of us are calling the “Post-Covid Hyper-Capitalism” (PCHC) era, we predict that the real new normal is our current breakneck pace of commerce. Where this impacts hotels is that attention spans are exceedingly limited. On the day of their departure, it is worth automating sending a feedback form or a request to submit a review on popular platforms like Google or TripAdvisor. You may also use this opportunity to promote loyalty programmes for returning guests, capitalising on the positive experience your guests have had at your property.