By Larry Mogelonsky, MBA, P. Eng. (www.hotelmogel.com)
While we all await the dissemination of a COVID-19 vaccine
throughout the first half of 2021, budgets will remain tight while reservations
will be slim. With fewer staffers available to manage inquiries, you still need
to ensure that service delivery is never compromised for the guests you have,
while at the same time ensuring a smooth ramp-up as we transition out of this
pandemic. Plus, in our current climate of lower occupancies, you cannot afford
a bad review tarnishing your online reputation.
Compounding this is the need for contactless communications.
Traveler behavior has all but permanently changed and going forward most of
your correspondence with guests will happen digitally via branded messaging
apps, email or texting platforms like WhatsApp. Together, these factors make a
very compelling case for implementing a hotel messaging platform, particularly
one that has a chatbot function to handle basic queries.
To get an expert in on the conversation, I reached out to,
Michael Kessler, CEO for ReviewPro which provides a full suite of guest
experience management tools, to learn about where this tech niche is headed.
“It goes without saying that your prebooked guests or any casual shoppers would
prefer their requests be answered in as timely a manner as possible,” said
Kessler. “For this, a continuously learning AI can seriously help. In fact,
these tools are already widespread; you’ve probably communicated with an AI in
the past, whether you were conscious of it or not.”
Indeed, roughly nine out of ten questions posed to hotels
can be succinctly addressed with a preprogrammed response. Where are you
located? What amenities does your resort have? Is your restaurant open? These
types of asks can all be outsourced to a chatbot – also, one that can instantly
translate the answers into a user’s native language – so that your live agents
can focus on handling the more complex requests.
Better and speedier guest service along with the potential
for cost savings are what these platforms can provide. But it’s a mature market
and there are quite a few vendors who can meet your needs.
The challenge then is selecting the right one that can best
augment service delivery and offer some tools for shaping the future of your
hotel. To help you better determine what makes for a guest messaging platform
with a robust feature set, here are some functions to look for as you
reevaluate your tech stack in the coming months.
1. Hospitality specialization. It’s easy
for any vendor to simply say that their solution works for hotels, but our
industry comes with so many nuanced issues that you really need a platform that
is purpose-built for just us and has mobile responsiveness. With that in mind,
your chosen platform should have a flexible configuration that can streamline
the interdepartmental coordination that has traditionally caused service
delivery hiccups in the past. As well, the ability to customize the user
interface can go a long way to subtly reinforcing your brand and giving guests
peace of mind that their needs are being managed attentively.
2. App agnosticism. The customer is
always right, which in this case means that you shouldn’t try to get guests to
only use your own branded app, but that you are flexible to talk with them
through whichever medium they prefer. A solid messaging platform must integrate
with a myriad of other solutions such as SMS, WhatsApp, WeChat and others,
while still bringing conversation threads onto one centralized system for your
team to evaluate then disseminate your follow-up back out via the medium your
guest is using.
3. OTA and other third-party integrations. Building
on the previous point, one problem that needs to be addressed in 2021 is not
letting requests made on OTAs go unanswered. Make a good impression by having
your guest service via the OTAs fully reflect the attentiveness that users on
your own native apps would receive. If you want to convert these customers to
book direct, you have to bring on a platform that can easily connect to these
third-party websites and house all the specific conversation flows within your
own data ecosystem for any staff member to reference, analyze customer
sentiments or ‘tag in’ as needed.
4. PMS and booking engine integrations. The
flip side of the OTA coin is integrating with the PMS, CRM or directly with the
booking engine so that any customer interactions can be tied to a specific
reservation or guest profile. This gives the hotel full visibility on the
request to better anticipate next steps, upsell, offer additional services or
accurately logging complaints for the most appropriate recovery action. It also
creates a positive feedback loop that enhances sales from the hotel’s
brand.com. As a basic example here, a two-way PMS connection can tell you if
someone is a transient or group guest, where the response to the same question
could be entirely different for both individuals. Next, integrating with a
hotel’s CRM or case management system allows you to process then convert any
intentions built within normal human conversations into specific follow-up actions
to improve the onsite experience.
5. Analytics. We live in a data-driven
world, and rightfully so because there’s so much we can do to increase team
performance and revenues by continually tweaking our operations to better fit
with changing guest expectations. By having a smart analytics tool, you can
examine what types of questions are most commonly asked to determine the most
effective responses or what times of day the most inquiries are coming in as
well as benchmark performance against a few key indicators. For example, if
most of your maintenance requests are initiated between the hours of 5pm and
9pm then how should you adjust your staffing in the engineering department?
And, of course, data greatly helps with segmentation insofar as finding those
unique guest psychographics to offer truly personalized offers, packages and
onsite experiences.
6. Escalation. Even with a machine
learning component, you will nevertheless need to migrate many requests to a
live agent, especially in error recovery situations. Thus, a robust chatbot for
the decade ahead must come with a strong foundation of natural language
processing (NLP) to drive sentiment analysis as well as customizable escalation
parameters to determine when and how to bump a conversation up to your intake
team, all so that service is never endangered. With any escalation, a case
should be automatically created and assigned to the right department, be it
room service orders, housekeeping matters or maintenance issues, all with
timescales and full manager visibility to provide accountability and set
employee performance markers.
7. Automating outbound communications. If
2021 is anything like 2020, then you know that operating protocols may need to
quickly change in response to new mandates for PPE or COVID-19 safety. The
onsite experience will thus be better if your guests know what to expect and
automating these updates via programmed outbound messages means your teams are
not burdened with manual repetition. Secondly, having the ability to send out mass
messages can create opportunities for additional revenue capture. While
cross-selling and upselling have been mentioned before, what’s critical in
today’s leisure-dominant travel landscape is that you optimize TRevPAR (total
revenue) by encouraging guests to utilize more of your onsite amenities or to
opt for a stay suite in lieu of a standard room. Sales messages of this sort
will be more impactful and more profitable if they are designed according to
segmentations and specified stages in the customer journey, both of which can
be better discerned via a platform that keeps a detailed log of conversation
flows.
With any luck, 2021 will not only signal a sharp return to
2019 levels of occupancy and revenues, but also a year that will help set you
up for seamless and cost-effective operations management for the rest of the
decade. Take this time to see what technologies you can implement to ensure
your team isn’t overwhelmed once guests start returning.
About Larry Mogelsonsky
Larry Mogelonsky
One of the world’s most published writers in hospitality, Larry Mogelonsky
is the principal of Hotel
Mogel Consulting Limited, a Toronto-based consulting practice. His
experience encompasses hotel properties around the world, both branded and
independent, and ranging from luxury and boutique to select-service. Larry is
also on several boards for companies focused on hotel technology. His work
includes five books “Are You an Ostrich or a Llama?” (2012), “Llamas Rule”
(2013), “Hotel Llama” (2015), “The Llama is Inn” (2017) and “The Hotel Mogel”
(2018). You can reach Larry at larry@hotelmogel.com to discuss hotel business
challenges or to book speaking engagements.
Media Contact:
Larry Mogelonsky
Email: larry@hotelmogel.com
Website: http://hotelmogel.com/
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