Chatbots are easily one of the best ways to quickly and significantly improve both the efficiency and quality of your guest and customer service teams / staff.
Why, you might ask? Simple! Chatbots take care of most of the repetitive tasks and conversations guest and customer support teams need to deal with and give them the ability to engage in meaningful interactions with guest and drive value as much as possible.
Here are a few reasons why chatbots are such a huge benefit for guest facing teams
1 - Chatbots save staff tons of time
This is one of the most clear benefits. Chatbots do an incredible job of answering many of the repetitive questions and messages that teams have to deal with thousands of times a day.
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Rental hosts spend at least 2 hours a day, per listing, messaging with guests. If you’ve scaled or if you’re trying to scale, this adds up very, very quickly. In fact, the majority of our users are spending over 100 hours a week messaging back and forth with guests.
While a chatbot can’t answer every single question, it does a really great job of answering at least 70% of repetitive questions and messages.
What does this mean for you and your team?
It means that you’re saving an hour and a half per listing each day with effective automation. Because chatbots respond automatically and because it can detect what type of conversation is being conducted and the context associated with it. So even for the messages that your team does need to take care of, the responses take much much less time to formulate!
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Another huge benefit of the chatbot saving time is its ability to reduce staff burnout. According to research, 74% of customer service agents (including guest support staff) will face burnout. A huge part of why this burnout happens is the stress associated with handling repetitive messages all the time.
Reducing agent workload and letting them primarily engage in meaningful conversations and interactions also positively impacts guest experiences and satisfaction.
2 - Chatbots are incredibly personalized
Personalized experiences are crucial for hospitality - especially for hotels and rentals. That “wow factor” and “magic” associated with a great trip and stay is in no small part due to the small gestures and personalized touches a great host or hotel will engage in.
Unfortunately, this level of personalizations if often prohibitively resource intensive and expensive for anything but luxury brands. However, chatbots and automation allow anyone - from the mom and pop AirBnB hosts to large hotel brands to deploy personalized experiences and interactions at any scale.
Guests want to be remembered. They want their preferences and selections to be remembered. Chatbots are great at doing this. They’re able to recognize customers, remember their names, preferences, choices, and wants and deliver responses, suggestions, and information to them, tailored based on what they’ve already done.
In fact, according to Google Research, 57% of U.S. travelers feel that the brands, hotels, rentals, etc. they interact with should personalize their information based on past behaviors and preferences.
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One of our users in New Hampshire uses personalized AI and chatbots to deliver the best possible experiences for her guests. Yada helps her understand her guests and gives her the data needed to tailor each stay to each guest in a personal, granular way. And the resulting reviews and increase in repeat visitors speak for themselves.
3 - Chatbots can answer a lot. Immediately.
We’ve touched on this before but it’s important enough such that we need to touch upon it again. Advanced AI such as the type that yada has built can handle 70% of repetitive conversations and answer up to 85% of the typical questions that a guest might ask during the booking and arrival parts of their journey.
Chatbots and AI is also immediate. Which is of crucial importance to guests and travelers. According to Hubspot, 90% of customers consider an immediate response to be important to customer service queries. In industries like hospitality where you have hot seasons and slow seasons, scaling staff up and down is very difficult and it’s prohibitively expensive to be fully staffed throughout the entire year.
Immediacy is also a great way to drive loyalty. Customer service and guest interactions are now level with price and level with product when it comes to guests determining where they stay and spend their money.
Chatbots are crucial towards helping you grow your brand, loyalty, and scale.
Chatbots and teams working in tandem are the best way to give guests the experiences they want and need while at the same time enabling your staff to meaningful work and do the things which will make a difference in a guests journey.
