Key Focus:
A ton of effort goes into making your guests feel special. You go the extra mile to put together a personalized welcome basket with assorted chocolates; buy specialty coffee beans from local roasters; add the touch of luxury with silk pillowcases and fluffy robes. How can you know if all that extra work truly impresses your customers?
Interviewing every single guest is not plausible. Sending out customer feedback surveys usually happens post-stay, and frankly, not many guests opt-in. Voice AI assistants are the next best thing.
Their role is to handle frequently asked questions, automate room service, and set up an in-room environment. Most importantly they introduce a new way to interact with your hotel guests while they are in the room. What does it mean for the hotel management? Reality-based source of business insights and deep understanding of their customer.
In this article you will learn:
- How to create a customer-centric experience – converting in-room interactions with your guests into actionable insights.
- How to transform data into a company asset – ways to use data to optimize your hotel business.
- Real examples of data about customer behavior.
Turn Conversations With Your Guests into Valuable Business Insights
Interactions between the hotel and the guests, whether it’s face-to-face, or online: calls, emails, social media reviews, or satisfaction surveys, mostly happen pre- and post-stay. In-room voice AI interactive technologies introduce a new bi-directional communication channel, and source data from the conversations to inform about what your guests feel and experience in your hotel. Big data analytics help you tap into uncovered areas, like in-room time. Aiello Voice Assistant (AVA) provides the most comprehensive data possible as its talk & touch capability covers a wide range of interactions:
- what hotel service they need, and frequently asked questions about hotel facilities (for revenue teams)
- their reasons to travel and popular surrounding attractions (for partnership teams)
- information on the room amenities, furniture, or equipment (for directors of rooms)
- what types of entertainment and in-room experience do they prefer (room control usage and IoT, music, TV, chit chat; handy information for IT & rooms teams)
The teams can use this information to optimize the product and personalize it to the customers’ preferences because now you know what service they expect.
Uncover Gaps in the Guest Experience: Questions or Behavior You Did Not Expect
Do hotel guests want to talk to machines? The numbers don’t lie. Aiello Voice Assistant has had over 12 million conversations with over 1.5 million hotel guests with the frequency of 20 interactions per day and per room.
Guest interactions with Aiello Voice Assistant throw light on aspects of the customer behavior that weren’t obvious before. With this information, the teams can plan action items such as expanding the variety of in-room amenities, launching new services, or partnering with surrounding businesses and altogether improve the guest experience.
Our Clients Used Aiello Voice Assistant to Identify:
Which in-room amenities and services to provide:
“Are the hotel pillows for sale?”
“Can I buy the hotel bathrobe?”
“Do you offer feminine hygiene products?”
With the record of what amenities are popular among the guests, the hotels know how to optimize their orders in terms of both item selection and quantity.
Which information is important to the guests
The hotel management at Silks Place Tainan, a client of Aiello, discovered that except for the opening hours of the swimming pool the guests often ask questions like:
“What’s the PH level of the swimming pool?”
“Do you sell goggles and swimming caps?”
Potential partnership opportunities
Data help understand guests’ travel preferences and choose which surrounding businesses to partner with.
“Where can I get my hair done?”
“Where to rent a scooter?”
*Read more about how to upsell your property and benefit from local partnerships with AVA in this article.
Prevent and Handle Complaints
Nearly 50% of the hotel guests say they don’t report all the issues they encounter during their stay. They want to avoid confrontation with the hotel staff and find the process too complicated. [Source] Yet, they are likely to share their negative experiences online, tell friends, and, depending on how severe the issue is, possibly never come back.
“The water pressure of the shower head is too low.”
“The TV screen won’t stop flickering.”
“The AC control doesn’t work. “
“There is no power outlet at the desk.”
With Aiello Voice Assistant, our clients were able to discover and act on the above problems immediately and turn around an unpleasant experience. Investing time and effort to identify problems and take quick action while the guests are still in the hotel communicates that the brand cares about building trust and creating a truly customer-centric experience.
Turn Data into Business Asset: Build Customer Loyalty
When it comes to luxury hotel services, details matter. AVA propels your existing CRMs with comprehensive information about guest personas. How? Big Data Analytics structures information such as often asked questions, topics of interest, travel preferences, room service selection, most popular features, or frequency and times of interactions into guest profiles.
78% of consumers are more likely to repurchase from companies that treat them as individuals and recommend them to their families and friends. [Source: Mc Kinsey & Company]
By signing up for a loyalty program, the guests are asking for special attention. AVA is the ultimate source of insights on what matters to your premium customers. AVA collaborates with the local social messaging app LINE. First, hotels set up a joint account with Aiello. Guests, who follow the account, get personalized travel recommendations, coupons, or special offers on their smartphone, and their preferences go straight into your CRM. All in all, these insights help you define which actions to take in order to stay relevant to your guests’ preferences, and the building blocks for retaining customer loyalty.
Conclusion
Whether it’s handling and preventing complaints, sourcing beneath-the-surface information about your guests, or building guest loyalty, Aiello Voice Assistant can help. With Aiello Voice Assistant, we have moved on from being just a nice touch in the guest experience and became a valid source of actionable business insights driving deep customer understanding.
Employing a Voice of Customer strategy at your hotel means that you are actively catering to your guests and personalizing their experience. Seize the opportunity to get first-hand information about what your guests really want and start making reality-based business decisions today!
Aiello (or “we”) takes privacy very seriously. We are fully committed to maintaining confidentiality, and protection of the guests’ personal information:
- AVA activates only after hotel guests consent to using the service. The guests can opt-out or mute the Aiello Voice Assistant at any time.
- Hotels can customize a consent-based welcome message which will appear on the screen when the guests first enter their room.
- AVA starts listening and receiving commands only after the voice trigger: 'Hello AI'. The voice assistant automatically turns off at the end of voice interaction, and no voice records will be stored. The rest of the time, no data will be received, stored, or sent to the cloud.‘
- All data is anonymous. We do not link any conversations, commands, requests, or activity to a particular guest unless they specifically agreed on it.
Keen to learn more about what we do at Aiello? Drop us a message at enquiry@aiello.ai to kickstart your data transformation with voice AI!
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