At Your Request
Part of the luxury of a hotel stay is having most of the usual housekeeping tasks out of your hands. Washing towels, cleaning up your room, even the task of making your bed is handled by around-the-clock hotel staff, allowing you to enjoy your stay in a worry-free manner.
In a way, the experience for the customer is already, to some degree at least, automated, because they do not need to worry about much of, well, anything. Even figuring out what to eat for breakfast is often decided by hotel staff.
In this sense, it may seem that only hotel staff would notice if many of the hotel’s tasks were automated, yet this is untrue, because customers will certainly notice automation, because it will make their stay even better!
Keep reading for one increasingly popular example of how the hospitality industry can implement AI technology to the delight of hotel guests and staff alike. We will discuss conversational computing, the subfield of AI that is dedicated to teaching computers to easily converse with humans in a way that is clear, fluent, and attuned to subtleties and cues within conversation.
Conversational Computing is At Your Service
Here is something that customers will most certainly benefit from.
Traditionally, if a guest wants a new towel, they would ring the front desk from their room’s landline phone and ask for one.
Hotels that implement conversational computing platforms have given customers an easier alternative to calling up the front desk, which is texting.
Guests can be lounging at the outdoor pool and text the hotel for room service, such as taking their used towels and supplying fresh ones. From anywhere, they can use their personal phone to ask for service, and be in conversation with a cheerfully eager and helpful servant.
This servant will be a chatbot that, for many customers, will pass the Turing test, meaning they will not even realize that they are talking to a computer rather than a human.
Conversational computing platforms, such as those offered by Findability Sciences, can handle numerous customer calls, i.e. texts, asking for hotel service, and simultaneously. The front desk clerk can only handle so many calls at once, but a chatbot can handle many calls, and relay the necessary information, such as a few fresh towels for room 123, to the staff.
Automating the fielding of requests ultimately saves time for the staff to attend to more urgent tasks and makes for a more smooth experience for guests.
Your Wish is AI’s Command
One of the aspects of conversational computing platforms that makes it amenable to customers is its machine learning capabilities that makes it readily personalizable for each unique customer.
For example, a chatbot will learn the name of the customer that reaches out to it, addressing them by name, formally of course. It can also detect typos in the customers’ texts, and learn which are the most common, along with the correct form of the word the customer is (mis)using.
Chatbots can also be fine-tuned to meet the certain vibe that the hotel wants to give off. If you want a strict no-emojis rule for employee-customer interactions, then that can be arranged. Likewise, a more informal, buddy-ish chatbot tone can be created as well.
Whether you want your hotel’s chatbot to sound like an easygoing and eager friend or a trim and proper professional, you can be assured that the chatbot will process the request for a bottled water no matter how it speaks to the customer or not. In other words, an emoji will not change the overall effectiveness of the chatbots to ensure that customers get the high quality and satisfactory service that you strive to give them.
Summary, and More Uses for AI in Hotels
Conversational computing chatbots are only the tip of the AI iceberg when it comes to digital transformation in the hospitality industry. For one, hotels are scrambling to figure out ways to turn the metaverse into a profitable asset to their hotel experience, one such example being giving virtual tours of your hotel so that potential customers can preview your hotel in the metaverse.
Whether your hotel will or will not use the metaverse to market to customers, you can still be assured that chatbots are a good bet for making customer-staff interactions much more efficient for both parties.
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