If all roads lead to Rome, all digital paths should lead to the hotel's website. The website is the center of any company's digital ecosystem. Traffic from all digital activities and online business presence - platform accounts, social media, emails, messengers and elsewhere, should be directed to the website as the place where direct online bookings take place and data on customer behavior and interests is collected. If your hotel does not purposefully collect data about your customers from all possible sources and does not analyze it, the best day to start doing it is today.
After Google announced that it would no longer support third-party cookies from 2023, the world of digital marketing and sales turned into a turmoil. What does the hotel website and the AI chatbot on it have to do with this drama? Everything!
Your hotel may or may not use third-party cookies, but in every case data collection is already a must. What the hotel can do is to focus on first- and zero-party customer data collection. This is the data that the hotel collects directly - on the website such as information about customer behavior, as well as data that the hotel guests share voluntarily, online, and offline - name, email, phone number contact and more.
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The hotel needs this data to know its customers well, to be able to reach them with its marketing messages, to provide up-to-date and improved services and content, to discover new guest’s trends based on their search and questions, to be more flexible, more competitive and make smarter decisions.
Collecting first- and zero-party data about customers and guests would require using more than one instrument together to obtain balanced and objective information about the customers that is always up-to-date and ready for analyses. Adding a tool for instant communication with customers on the website become a necessity. Don't count on guests to write an email or call you when they haven't found what they were looking for.
Most users prefer to chat, and when they write their question - in a live chat or in a messenger, they expect an immediate answer. If the hotel can't provide an immediate response 24/7 from the team through these live communication channels, then next option is to replace the human power with an AI chatbot on the website to assist both guests and employees.
Point of contact
The AI chatbot is rapidly moving out of the "good-to-have" tool in the "must have" solution. It’s not only about the first- and zero-party data collection, as the AI digital assistant is also a response to the guests’ service expectations for self-service.
The web-based AI chatbot acts as the first and immediate point of contact for customers, answers frequently asked questions instantly 24/7, and collects inquiries from both potential and in-house guests. Everything that happens in the chatbot is accumulated and summarized in statistics on consumer behavior: what information was seen the most, what questions were asked the most, what is the busiest chat time of the day, how many users came back again and more. The collected data is general therefore GDPR compliant and allows the hotel to watch for trends and opportunities in operations, services and sales.
Built-in service and booking request forms in the chatbot help further the sales of the hotel services by collecting instantly not only the guests’ inquiries therefore improving guests stay but also a customer data as name, email, telephone number, preferences, etc. For guests this is a convenient, fast and easy assistance, for the hotel – more up-to-date zero-party data.
Each element of the chatbot can have its own link and QR code, which allows hotel guests to navigate to a specific page of the website with the specific element in the chatbot (information, file to download, form to fill in, etc.) with one click or one scan from anywhere - online and offline.
For example, from the hotel room through a QR code - to a request form for a table reservation or wake-up call in the chatbot. As a technological solution, the AI chatbot is multifunctional and helps to serve hotel customers, promotes services, becomes an additional sales channel and saves time and resources (saves up to 12 minutes of conversation time with client to staff). It is therefore not surprising that in 2022 the introduction and supply of hotel chatbots is expected to increase by 53% (64% among independent hotels), according to a January 2022 study by the NYU Tisch Center of Hospitality and StayNTouch PMS.
Once the hotel plans a strategy how to use an AI chatbot to benefit most of the technology, build the processes that the hotel team will follow and implement the plan, AI chatbot as service, sales and data collection tool will become a key element of the hotel digital ecosystem with huge benefits for the hotel, customers and staff.