Beyond the hype: The rise of conversational AI in hospitality

” could become a blog post that also features reviews from past guests who recommend the hotel specifically for this purpose – and better positions the hotel for conversational search recommendations. If your hotel already uses such solutions, they can be integrated with conversational AI to collect and verify necessary information from guests before their arrival. Conversational AI-driven tools can be used to keep track of customer reviews and comments on social media.

• Without AI hoteliers have to manually handle every tasks order of arrival and cannot organize them.
• As part of an international project looking at the impact of AI on cities, we recently “broke ground” on a new field of research called AI urbanism.
• 77% of consumers are more likely to recommend your business to their friends after receiving a positive customer service experience.
• New opportunities will emerge too — like “model as a service.” For example, if you have a lot of data in a particular industry, like travel, you may be able to monetize and sell that.
• Other than that, the chatbot can also be used to request room service, housekeeping, etc.

The Poly AI example shows the potential of the conversational layer helping hotels in unexpected ways. And, as AI continues to develop, it will become a mission-critical tool for hotels to optimize operations, personalize experiences and deepen relationships with guests. However, as technology advances and algorithms become more sophisticated, these challenges are likely to be mitigated. Some companies pride themselves on containment, but at the expense of customer satisfaction and the quality of the experience. If the virtual assistant can handle the task well, handle it, otherwise take them to an agent. Regardless of the channel, it is important to have one source of truth for the customer.

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AI urbanism does not simply quantify, it tells stories, explaining why and how certain events take place. It is exciting to see all the advancements in conversational AI in the Travel and Hospitality industry. I look forward to seeing new use cases and further incorporation of personalization into the experiences. Whether it’s recommending local attractions, providing dining suggestions, or addressing concerns promptly, conversational AI ensures guests feel valued and attended to throughout their stay.

We have preferences that we may have explicitly set or can be implied based on our behaviors. The goal is for the technology to “just know me” regardless of which company one is interacting with or channel interacting on. As Andrei indicates, people are willing to provide data if you are willing to provide something of value in return. Conversational AI enables brands to scale operations and adapt quickly, at low cost, in a practical way. For example, the airline industry has been hit particularly hard through the pandemic with lower volumes of passengers. On top of it, the world is unpredictable — events like a volcano erupting, flooding, or even the current war in Europe occur.

Human agents are important

Enterprises often look at the traditional contact center metrics like first call resolution, cost per contact, and other metrics around escalations. Some of these may not even be that useful — like the average handling time (AHT) as our experts point out. As Comes adds, being multi-channel is about meeting users where they are and where they want to interact. And yet this is exactly the kind of question that we are increasingly delegating to AI in urban governance. This might save our city managers some time, given AI’s extraordinary velocity in analysing large volumes of data, but the price that we are paying in terms of social justice is enormous.

If the user is calling from their phone, the company should know who they are; and if they booked a flight or hotel, it should know that as well. The technology can leverage all the information it has about the user and context to help preempt customer frustration. How a chatbot or voice assistant phrases a question will have an impact on how the customer responds, which can impact whether the conversation goes down the right path or wrong path.

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Read more about Conversational AI Hospitality here.