When considering your CX strategy, adding chatbot automation for travel and hospitality companies is a great way to empower your customers and streamline your customer service operations.
Across all fields of travel and hospitality, OutPLEX can provide you with customer experience management solutions that can are guaranteed to boost your successes and save you money on operational costs. With our help, you can figure out what your customers really need while working to meet your short- and long-term business goals.
OutPLEX Offers Various Customer Experience Management Solutions
As Forbes reports, customer willingness to engage with automated systems is high, but their expectations for such systems remain mediocre: for example, 46% believe automation cannot give them a good experience. This doubt is predominantly due to the subpar iterations of chatbots that prevailed in years past.
For this reason, it is essential for travel and hospitality industry businesses to pick the right chatbot automation vendor.
At OutPLEX, we have spent over two decades developing and refining communication solutions across voice and digital channels. We can either upgrade your existing systems or install new technologies such as:
- Chatbot automation: Installing an intuitive chatbot on both desktop and mobile versions of your website enables customers to get fast answers to frequently asked questions.
- Digital messaging: Text messages, WhatsApp messages, and other forms of digital communication are convenient ways for your customers to communicate with you, just like they communicate with family and friends.
- Call centers: Traditional contact centers, where customers dial a phone number and get help from a live agent, still have a place in today’s customer service arena. However, enhancing basic phone support to include conversational AI for IVR as well as voice to digital technologies will bring your call center solutions into modern-day support options that meet and exceed customer expectations.
The more channels you offer customers to get in touch with you, the more you can improve:
- Customer satisfaction: Customers may be happier when you provide them with the option of using communication channels they already like and are comfortable with. Most consumers now refer to digital support as their number one ranked method of support.
- Customer retention: When customers get what they need/expect from a company, they are more likely to remain brand loyal.
- Your conversion rate: Fast, responsive customer service is a great selling point. Customers who value a great CX may choose you over competitors with less attentive service.
- Your bottom line: Our clients experience an average savings of 40% on their labor costs after partnering with us.
- Your entire business: Outsourcing your customer experience management to OutPLEX can allow you to focus on and reinvest in your core business.
What Are Chatbots Used For?
Chatbot automation for travel and hospitality businesses can be the perfect tool to respond to basic customer inquiries and FAQs pertaining to:
- Availability for booking
- Making or canceling a reservation
- Reservation or booking status
- Arrival/departure times
- Delays & cancellations
- Ancillary services available
Chatbots are still relatively new, but customers have quickly become acclimated to them. Page 11 of the Conversocial State of CX Trends Report 2021 shows that nearly 70% percent of customers said they would be willing to use a bot if it was quicker than traditional customer service methods.
To take advantage of this trend, let OutPLEX design a customized chatbot designed to meet customer needs and promote business goals.
How Does Chatbot Automation for Travel & Hospitality Work?
At OutPLEX, our team of conversation designers, bot tuners, and other digital experts work hard to develop, install, and enhance chatbot solutions that work with our client’s existing systems and enable them to reach their goals faster than they would have otherwise. Here is a brief overview of how chatbots work.
Before Installation
OutPLEX works closely with our clients to determine:
- What capabilities do they want their chatbot to have
- What they want to accomplish by installing a chatbot
- The capabilities and limitations of existing tech systems
By defining and establishing parameters beforehand, we save you time and trouble down the line.
During Installation
We use our clients’ previous customer interactions to build the knowledge base and ‘teach’ the chatbot how to react to queries on a variety of topics. We can also program it to “learn as it goes” by remembering each interaction and incorporating those lessons into future interactions.
Finally, we perform all necessary technical tests and checks to ensure the chatbot will function as expected once it goes online.
After Installation
Our job does not end once the chatbot is up and running. We continue to provide support by:
- Constantly monitoring the success of the automation
- Training agents to step in and take over whenever the bot struggles
- Responding to technical issues
- Tweaking or reprogramming the chatbot as your needs change
Digital Customer Interactions Are the Future
According to Pages 2-3 of a whitepaper by Tata Consultancy Services, the future of travel services—and aviation in particular—involves being more proactive about meeting customer needs. This could include:
- Personalizing service: Provide each customer with information and offers that are tailor-made to match their location, needs, and destination.
- Anticipating customer needs: This could include everything from sending reminders about flight times to automatically pulling up a boarding pass on the customer’s phone rather than making the customer do it.
- Offering special bonuses: You can use digital channels to offer exclusive upgrades or additional amenities.
- Protecting privacy: As digital systems grow increasingly common, it will be increasingly more important to safeguard customer privacy and protect their personal information.
Some of these services are not yet the norm in the travel industry. However, they all involve digital messaging, and they all demonstrate the increasing prevalence of such high-tech solutions. Digitally transform your business by allowing OutPLEX to take responsibility for your chatbot automation and other digital channels.
Digital Channels Benefit from a Strong Call Center
Like any other piece of technology, chatbots and digital channels have their strengths and limitations. Strengths include:
- Speed: There are no wait times with chatbot automation. As soon as a customer asks a question, they can get a reply within seconds.
- Self-service: The customer does not have to rely on anyone else for answers. Digital channels give them the tools they need to get answers independently.
- Ease of use: All a customer has to do is type in a key phrase. The automation can respond with an answer or suggested topics.
- The ability to answer common questions: In the travel industry, this could mean questions about bookings, reservations, cancellations, departure or arrival times, directions to your facility, and more.
By contrast, a call center’s strength is its ability to be there when, for whatever reason, a customer cannot get answers through a digital channel. At OutPLEX, we employ talented call center agents who can:
- Help with complex issues: A live agent can stay on the line for as long as it takes to talk a customer through to a complicated solution.
- Encourage upselling and retention: Our agents can determine when it is appropriate to suggest ancillary services to a customer. They can also ask pointed questions to figure out why a customer may be thinking of changing brands and take steps to change their mind.
- Offer empathy: A live agent can sense when a customer is frustrated. They can provide compassionate reassurance that they are doing everything possible to resolve the problem.
- Be retrained: If anything about a live agent’s approach does not serve your business objectives, we can work with you to design a new approach and teach our agents how to implement it.
Save Money Through Nearshoring
Our call centers are located in countries geographically and culturally close to the United States. This is called nearshoring. Unlike offshoring, where call center agents are far away from your customers (often in India or the Philippines), nearshoring offers the benefits of:
- Shared time zones: Our agents are alert and prepared during the hours when your customers need them most.
- Shared language(s): By employing agents who natively speak both English and Spanish (as well as any other necessary languages), we can help a greater percentage of your customers in their most comfortable language.
- Greater savings: Operating nearshore costs less than operating in the United States. When we save money, so do our clients.
Get a Free Quote by Contacting Us Today
Start revolutionizing your customer service experience right away. Our diverse range of CX services—including chatbot automation and other digital solutions—can help boost your travel or hospitality industry business today. OutPLEX looks forward to providing you with a free quote that explains more about the value of our customer experience management solutions.
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Learn more about our Travel & Hospitality CX Solutions.