From a look and feel-perspective, all chatbots look similar. However, some will deliver excellent service to your guests; others will generate frustration. If you want to make the right choice for your hotel or group, look for these essential decision criteria. This article provides four tips to help you choose the right chatbot to achieve your hotel(s) strategic goals.
4 Tips to Select a Chatbot
Below are tips that help you select the right chatbot for your hotel.
1. Work With a Specialist
Training in Artificial Intelligence (AI) requires a lot of time, effort, and a massive volume of customer interactions. To avoid unnecessary costs by starting from scratch, choose a tailor-made chatbot.
Focus on providers, such as Quicktext, that can offer pre-trained hotel chatbots already calibrated to answer guests’ queries. Hoteliers only need to populate these chatbots with their property information, and their chatbot is ready to go.
Such chatbots are affordable, offer the best possible accuracy, and usually have existing connectivities with your booking engine, upsell task management system, etc.
2. Employee Count on LinkedIn is a Good Proxy for Development Capabilities
It is simple math: if the company you are considering only has a handful of employees, they will likely focus their effort on the appearance (front end) and compromise on the chatbot abilities & back end. Such solutions won’t hold in the long run. So, look at the company you are considering and investigate their expertise, for example, by checking their employees on LinkedIn.
2 chatbots can look the same on the outside but behave entirely differently when you start asking real-life questions.
3. Have a Clear Vision of What you Want to Achieve with a Chatbot
In a demo call, you will receive much information, and every solution will look great. But it would help if you filtered out the solutions that will best help you achieve your strategic goals: Answer customer questions instantly, increase direct bookings, and save time for your team.
Ability to Increase Direct Reservations
Check essential reservation abilities: Can the chatbot handle multiple room bookings? What about groups, events, and flexible travel dates?
How does the chatbot integrate into your sales process? Online visitors who interact with your bot are highly qualified, so you really want to make sure that if a customer doesn’t book online, your hotel sales team can follow up and close the deal. To verify your candidate chatbot’s ability to capture customer data & opt-in and pass them to staff efficiently.
Below is an example of a booking request sent to staff by a hotel chatbot. With this summarized information hotel sales team can easily follow up on booking requests that weren’t converted automatically.
Handle Customer’s Questions & Requests Instantly
Look for short and precise answers instead of long, all-encompassing texts. Customers expect clear answers and do not read long texts. Look for a chatbot that delivers precise and accurate information instead of broad solutions that won’t be relevant to anyone.
Save Time for Your Team
Some providers will claim that their chatbot can handle customer requests. Still, if the answer to “I want to book for a group,” “I want an upgrade,” or “I need to cancel my reservation” is “Please email [email protected],” which is the kind of answer that will not be helpful to your customers and generates extra work for your staff. Look for chatbots that can manage complete processes seamlessly instead of the glorified FAQ.
How does the chatbot interact with your team when escalation is needed? Chatbots should help your section and not create additional pressure. How does the chatbot react if human service is necessary but there is no one to answer?
4. Data Management and scalability
How the chatbot handles data management and scalability is essential. Below, you can get inspired by questions you need to take into consideration when choosing the right chatbot for your company.
Data Management is Usually a Blind Spot for Hoteliers
How does the chatbot handle dynamic content, such as hotel availability and prices, upsell opportunities, etc? Is the chatbot connected to your booking engine and potentially other systems?
How does the chatbot handle static content? Static content is the information that doesn’t change every day such as check-in time, swimming pool, parking, spa, etc. How easy is managing these data in different languages with the chatbot you are considering?
Make Sure That Your Chatbot Has a Scalable Architecture
Is the chatbot you are considering able to answer via Live chat on your website, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat, Alexa, Google Assistant, etc?
For groups: How is the multi-property chatbot working? Do you have to select a specific hotel before you get an answer or is the bot able to find instantly all the hotels that have a swimming pool in Berlin? This is essential if you have several hotels in the same geographical area. Your chatbot needs to be able to guide customers to the hotel that best fits their needs.
Every hotel chatbot is different and choosing the right partner is essential for the success of your project. Chatbots are in constant evolution. So, in addition to these objective criteria, you should definitely ask providers about their vision and development goals over the next 2 years to make sure there is a long-term fit with the partner you are about to choose.
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