How T&H businesses can use consumer digital footprints to personalise services
Using AI and ML, travel & hospitality companies can identify which features of their loyalty program appeal to customers and which ones are deal-breakers
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Businesses across the globe have realized how important it is to include contemporary digital technology to drive constant growth and revenue. The last decade has seen incredible innovations and breakthroughs in the landscape of digital solutions. One of such compelling technologies is called Artificial Intelligence (AI).
As Travel and Hospitality (T&H) industries look to enhance customer experience, customer retention, customer service, and marketing strategies, AI and machine learning help them achieve this and more with new levels of disruption.
Let's look at several ways how T&H businesses can access and leverage their customer's digital footprint across various touchpoints to create better experiences for them using AI and mobility.
AI-powered chatbots have comfortably intruded into the travel and hotel industry to assist staff with several aspects of customer interaction. Travel chatbots help customers book travel tickets, check the status of their flights and trains, make hotel reservations, access 24/7 support services, and do these based on a variety of personal interests and preferences.
Expedia.com is a travel agency leveraging a chatbot to help its customers pick the ideal hotel. Although the website allows customers to look up hotels, flights, cars, and cruises, the Facebook Messenger based chatbot only handles hotel booking at the moment.
KLM Royal Dutch Airline is another business that makes use of chatbots. Its customers can opt-in to receive check-in notification, booking confirmation, flight status, and boarding pass updates via Messenger.
Artificial intelligence can help create fine-tune hyper-individualized campaigns to improve customer retention and revenue. At the same time, ML can enable gathering predictive data, identifying patterns within huge datasets, and comprehend customer behavior to facilitate personalization.
Hilton Hotels uses Connie, a robot concierge, to make guest experiences personalized and enjoyable. The two-foot-tall robot greets guests in the lobby, answers their questions, learns about them and offers personalized recommendations of restaurants and places to visit. The robot can also point guests toward several amenities they might need around the hotel.
Mobile solutions can improve the effectiveness of training and upskilling opportunities for employes, helping businesses in the T&H industries to consistently be the best service providers. Hyatt Hotels has nearly 670 properties in over 50 countries. After shifting their infrastructure to the cloud, the company decided to pursue mobility for employee training.
With social media, customers now like to express themselves instantly after taking a trip. Using artificial intelligence and machine learning, T&H companies can identify which features of their loyalty program appeal to customers and which ones are deal-breakers. Sentiment analysis helps businesses understand the positive and negative views of their customers by analyzing emotional behaviour on social platforms.
Often misconceived as a replacement for human power, the concept of AI as a technological aid is much larger, wider and pervasive. It has created greater trust, however, for the hospitality industry, showing the promise of transforming its processes, services and facilities through AI-powered robotics. Today, the hotel industry, where comfort-defining advancements are most rapidly incorporated, has sophisticated its entire system with the adoption of many innovative methods used for providing satisfying customer service.
Based on their behaviour, interests, and preferences, travel and hospitality businesses can retarget their customers by offering new recommendations, discounts, and offers for their next purchase.
Several other use cases mark how businesses in the travel and hospitality domain can leverage AI and mobility to empower their employees, improve their services, and appeal to their customers in more fascinating and unique ways. By utilizing AI and mobility for staff assistance, operations management, lodging services, back-office automation, and revenue accounting purposes, hotels and travel agencies can leverage these technologies for higher ROI and more revenue.
AI robots not only diminish the human involvement with its voice-activated assistants but also smarten the way hotel guest service is delivered to customer's satisfaction. From customer's personal choices to their smallest of needs, AI-enabled hotel concierge bots can offer minute service and careful assistance.
Apple's Siri started providing voice-activated assistance to its mobile users to an extent that it has become almost a norm now. Amazon Echo and Alexa have also joined the race of creating a richer, more delightful customer experience using the power of machine learning of AI software.
Ever since the artificially intelligent system has crept into the hotel industry, the hospitality sector is abuzz with AI's ability to learn about customers using its data analytics platform that helps hotel staff create a better frame of customers. Utilizing the full potential of AI software, they can capture a gamut of information about: Customer Purchases; Travel choices; Journey patterns and itinerary; Location preferences; Hotel rating inquiries and Payment methods.
