A chatbot with advanced technology and suitably configured is capable of resolving more than 85% of the doubts and queries made by your hotel’s potential clients.
In other words, a chatbot can be a very important tool to help you increase the conversion rate of your website and streamline customer service processes.
Find out what you need to consider when choosing the best chatbot solution to increase direct bookings for your hotel.
First of all, what is a chatbot?
A chatbot is an automated messaging service that allows your hotel to have a conversation with a user, helping them answer questions and guiding them to make a reservation.
In addition to your hotel’s website, a hotel messenger with advanced functionality integrates with different communication channels such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, Telegram or WeChat, among others.
And unlike a live chat, which requires intervention by call centre agents or the reception team, with the chatbot the assistance is fully automated.
Specially developed for the hotel sector, HiJiffy’s Artificial Intelligence allows hotels to communicate with their guests in a personalized way using a “human touch”. So using a chatbot does not mean offering robotic conversations.
What advantages does a chatbot offer for your hotel?
- You will increase your sales
Chatbots offer immediate support to potential customers who visit your website: they answer their questions instantly and guide them through the booking process, which generates new sales opportunities and improves conversion rates.
- You will improve customer service
Available 24 hours a day and 365 days a year, the chatbots respond quickly to each of the questions that users ask, eliminating tedious waiting in online conversations.
- You will save staff and service costs
By automating customer service processes, chatbots allow you to save costs and reduce the time that customer service agents spend solving simple problems. Your hotel’s customer service staff can concentrate on tasks with greater added value, solving problems that require human intervention.
- You will improve customer satisfaction and experience
The chatbots respond to user questions with the answers you decide, instantly, and in several languages. In addition, they use machine learning to learn from past conversations and thus improve the quality of responses and user service.
- You will get to know the users who interact with your website better
Chatbots capture valuable data about users as they interact with them. They classify the data to find out the most common queries and understand what information they are looking for. By analysing the results, you will be able to identify the most common problems or questions among users and take the necessary measures to solve them.
How to choose a chatbot for your hotel?
These are the main features you should look for when choosing a chatbot for your hotel:
- Ability to perform availability and price searches in real time
It is important that your chatbot is integrated with your central reservation system so that availability and price queries can be made in real time. This will allow you to increase conversion rates and suggest alternative dates in case of unavailability, among other things.
HiJiffy’s solution is integrated with D-Edge, ensuring a seamless experience for users when booking their vacation.
- Ability to customize questions and answers.
The more information you can offer the user through your chatbot, the better service you will offer to your potential customers and the more likely they will solve any doubts for you and the user will end up making a reservation.
It should be noted that HiJiffy’s technology allows for a simple configuration process once the chatbot has been previously trained with the typical problems that most hotels face.
Chosen by over 1,600 hotels globally, the HiJiffy chatbot responds to millions of queries every year, which means that the Artificial Intelligence is already well developed and is capable of understanding an impressive number of different requests.
In addition, the HiJiffy chatbot has advanced artificial intelligence that has the ability to learn from past conversations. This allows answering more and more doubts and questions, as users ask them.
- Ability to record, manage and analyse customer data.
A chatbot must record the history of conversations and queries, structuring and ordering the information so that you can use it, analyse it and detect areas of opportunity or doubts that have not been covered by the tool.
This will allow you to adapt elements such as the content of your website, your pricing policy or the offers you make to the trends you identify in your users.
Thanks to an advanced Console, HiJiffy centralises all communication channels and allows you to collect, organize, filter and manage your guests’ data in compliance with GDPR regulations to better understand traveller trends, repetitive requests and be able to act with marketing tailored to the needs of your business.
- In addition to text, the ability to display visual elements, links or pdfs to users.
In this way, you will have the flexibility to display more visual and impactful content to influence the user’s decision making.
HiJiffy’s conversational app speeds up the time it takes to complete specific streams, increasing the chances of conversion by combining text-based messages with graphical elements.
Some of the essential elements that make HiJiffy’s solution so powerful are buttons (which can be combined with images), carousels, calendars or customer satisfaction indicators for surveys.
- Multilingual system, capable of detecting the client’s navigation language.
Simple but effective, this will make the chatbot, and therefore your hotel, more relevant to the user, which will improve their experience and perception of the service received.
HiJiffy’s chatbot communicates in more than 100 languages, ensuring efficient communication with guests from all over the world.
- “Click to Call” functionality.
If the chatbot does not find an answer, returning the call allows the user to contact a person from your hotel to resolve more complex questions.
This functionality, also included in the HiJiffy solution, will allow you to collect user contact data for later use in commercial or marketing actions.
- Ability to measure KPIs of the chatbot.
Knowing the main metrics will allow you to evaluate the performance of the solution.
The most common metrics that you will be interested in knowing are: average duration of queries, frequently asked questions, markets or languages most used in the communication flow, conversion ratio of conversations into reservations, and average value of reservations, among other things.
With the HiJiffy Console, it’s easy to analyse solution performance – on an individual property or even manage multiple properties – to better understand how to optimise hotel processes.
In summary…
A hotel chatbot can be an attractive solution, as it can automatically respond to more than 85% of guest requests, centralise all communication channels in one place, increase direct bookings, as well as enable contactless experiences (for example, check-in system for hotels or contactless check-out).
Many other reasons could be added to this list, making HiJiffy’s technology a top must-have solution in 2022 for all hoteliers already using the D-Edge platform.
