Several companies across different industries are discovering the potential of conversational bots to help automate and streamline operations, improve employee productivity, and boost employee and customer engagement.
Artificial intelligence and emerging technologies will help make quick and informed decisions, as well as craft highly personalized experiences for both customers and employees.
Micheal Mauldin coined chatterbot in 1994 describes conversational programs.
Automatically follow up on scheduled tasks
Enhanced ability to handle client queries by networking with other bots
Deliver highly personalized attention to clients/visitors to the website by being more conversational
Although there are SAAS based chatbots which can be utilized however custom chatbots are the perfect fit for a hospitality enterprise considering the following benefits:
A custom chatbot can enhance customer experience using AI.
Since the custom chatbots are not hosted on a solution provider’s server, the generated customer data including name, profile picture, email ID and contact number of the guests remain secured with hosting providers e.g.
A custom chatbot allows enterprises to upgrade the existing features or add more features such as intent, dialogue or entities depending upon the business requirement.
For example, you can feed your chatbot with thousands of conversational logs as per your need, that will be used by the bots to respond to each query in a personalized manner.
From the hotel’s website to social media channels such as Facebook, chatbots can be integrated anywhere, walking the visitors through the process of hotel bookings.
Enhanced Room Service
The AI-based chatbots can eliminate the need for hotel guests to interact with hotel staff, instead, establishing a virtual interaction through devices like mobiles. AI-driven bots will make it easy for the guests to perform tasks like ordering meals, getting suggestions for special dishes available in the hotel’s kitchen, regulating room temperature and lighting, receiving recommendations on sightseeing and visits etc. This way hotels can cut down on time, capital and human labor considerably.
Upselling Opportunities
A custom chatbot can easily cross-sell and upsell hotel services like spa, cafe or a bar. The chatbots can send hyper-personalized messages through push notifications or SMS, drawing insights on customer journey using their machine learning algorithms. They can use these insights to offer additional services to the guests depending upon their requirements.
Keeping in Touch Even after Check out
The custom chatbots can also engage with the guests even after they have checked out. Conducting personalized surveys to rate the customer’s hotel experience and sending them tailored discounts and offers via email marketing can essentially build customer loyalty and brand recall for the hotels.
Some of the popular chains of hotels that are using AI technologies include:
- Wynn Las Vegas integrating Amazon Echo to all their hotel rooms to allow the guests to access various hotel room features using voice command.
- Edwardian Hotels offering virtual hosts for enabling the guests to interact with the AI chatbot digitally and allowing self-service.
- Accor Hotels with their digital concierge named Mercure Bot that converses with the guests and helps them to know the local destinations better
AI-driven chatbot for hotels can essentially perform iterative tasks without roping in the hotel staff. While chatbot takes care of the monotonous requests, the hotel staff can engage in more productive tasks. Providing efficient guest communication and exceptional customer service, utilizing less time, capital, and human resources have made custom chatbot for enterprises the smartest revenue-generating technology for the hospitality industry.
For hotel enterprises that are serious about skyrocketing their sales, developing a custom chatbot can be a bit of a challenge. However, with customized chatbot solution, you can move one step closer to realizing the perfect hotel experience for your customers.
We at Affle Enterprise have developed chatbot for hotels, each built for a custom use case. Monitoring and witnessing the impact of their integration in real time.
For any queries regarding Mobile app development/Chatbot development, drop us a line @ [email protected].
Originally published at Affle Enterprise
Chatbot technology has come a long way and more businesses are using it to be available to customers even when the business might be closed or when customers are looking for a quick interaction while they multitask.
From marketing to customer service, chatbots are having a significant impact on both B2B and B2C organizations in terms of both information gathering, lead generation, and elevated service. Here are some of the ways businesses can benefits when deploying chatbots into the system.
How businesses can benefit from deploying chatbots
1. Always on service
A chatbot is available even when a customer service rep is not. It allows for better and more timely communication with customers looking to ask a question, check on the status of an order, and other customer service issues.
2. Cost-effectiveness
For many businesses, deploying a chatbot is a less expensive solution that staffing a customer service center for extra hours. Even though a chatbot may not be able to answer questions or concerns for as many issues as a live person, it is a better option than no communication and for most businesses, a well-developed chatbot is able to answer many top concerns or frequently asked questions.
3. Analytics
When you have a chatbot running, you’re able to pull reporting from the program that offers insight into what kinds of questions customers are asking and where they are in their buyer’s journey. This helps businesses better address their trouble spots and also create more effective content marketing and outreach.
According to the website Ubuntupit, choosing the right framework to develop your bot is key. “Choosing a useful and powerful chatbot framework completes more than 50% of your work if you want to have your chatbot. Recent developments in machine learning and AI modules has brought significant changes in chatbot’s features…You have to train your bot and determine the architecture, its goal, and responsibilities, and the channel where it is going to be deployed…some of the best and innovative machine learning companies are solely devoted to developing the best chatbots based on artificial intelligence and machine learning.”
If your business is looking to get into chatbot development and create a chatbot for your business, you need the right chatbot framework to get started. Here are some open-source chatbot platforms and other chatbot development programs to look into.
Top chatbot framework for developers
1. IBM Watson
IBM Watson is a leading AI software that business developers are using to build bots for their brand. One use case is building a virtual assistant that can respond to customers and also supply more useful information to business agents. Watson can help businesses “seamlessly automate tasks — from addressing customer requests to guiding employees through internal processes” all to help provide better service internally and externally. They also have a free assessment that helps evaluate your business and highlight where AI could help.
This platform helps business build, connect, publish, and manage smarter chatbots. It comes with active learning and includes pre-existing, pre-build models that allow your AI software to interact with users on chat program they’re already using, such as Skype, Slack, Facebook Messenger, Cortana, Microsoft Teams, Kik, and more. It is a full-service solution for natural language processing bot development.
Consider your last online shopping knowledge.
Whether it's going beyond customer expectations, earning customer trust or reimaging the supply chain, retailers can benefit by adopting a fresh digital perspective and developing innovative retail IT solutions.
The focus will shift to where both the digital and the physical experiences complement each other to create an improved retail experience for the consumer.
Consumers’ decisions are being extensively influenced by digital channels in a variety of locations, from in-store displays to augmented reality-equipped stores that allow the user to experience a product before purchasing.
QR code-based Payment Solutions: Helping customers avoid long payment queues.
This information provides valuable insights for retailers to help them understand consumers, analyze issues in their value chains or consumer journeys, and align products and content to customers’ needs.
To understand how AI bots can be used in business, we must first consider what bots are and what the capabilities of AI are.
The terms bots, chatbots, and AI are often used interchangeably.
The first chatbot was developed by Joseph Weizenbaum in 1994.
Even so, its available responses were limited to a very small number of keywords.
Both Siri and Alexa learn from their mistakes.
AI bots have many potential benefits for all types of businesses:
With the fast advancement in technology and ease of access of information, contemporary consumers have become more empowered.
Today insurance companies have enormous opportunity to deliver exceptional experience to their customers, thanks to AI-enabled chatbots!
You can now easily capture data, get insights from it and thereby take better actions.
Let’s take a look at how AI-powered chatbots are empowering insurance companies to better serve their customers.
However, a chatbot can demystify the jargons and put complex terms into simpler language while walking new customers through the sales funnel.
Unlike call centers wherein customers are put on hold, mostly due to limited number of agents, chatbots can handle hundreds of customers at a time.
