Excerpt from PhocusWire
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.
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.
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.
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