Hospitality and the Digital Concierge Christopher Schyma, VP Hospitality and Travel When it s time to book a hotel room, today s digitally immersed guests turn to the web. Unfortunately for many hoteliers today, Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) have captured the market and scoop up visitors well before they can make it to a hotel s site. After enjoying years of significant growth, the hospitality industry now needs to prepare for tougher times ahead, and, as such, many brands are looking to introduce price incentives and add-on services when booking direct--but is that really enough in a highly competitive space? OTAs are active and engaged during the booking process, but have to pass the baton off to the hotel before the stay even begins. While receiving what they may believe to be the best price by booking with an OTA, guests are inadvertently setting themselves up for a disjointed guest experience. This presents a significant and immediate opportunity for hospitality brands to create a competitive advantage over OTAs by leveraging digitally powered differentiated experiences that stitch together the guest s journey, from booking to pre-stay, in-property, and beyond. It s not enough simply giving the best price. By serving up the best guest experience, guests will be enticed to book directly with the brand in the future. As the experience improves, so will guest loyalty. The goal should be to provide each individual guest with an exceptional white-glove experience optimized to their specific needs. With thousands of hotels and millions of guests around the world, how can hoteliers customize the experience for every guest? How can they provide an experience so exceptional that guests see the detriment in booking with an OTA and the advantages of booking directly through the hotel? The solution to these seemingly impossible problems is the Digital Concierge.
What is a Digital Concierge? The latest customer experience (CX) technology enables hotels to put a personal concierge in the pocket of every guest. The Digital Concierge is a conversational, digitally-powered, and intelligent messaging experience embedded into your native app. With the Digital Concierge you can say goodbye to the disjointed model of the past. By augmenting existing native apps, hotels can provide higher value to their guests through every step of their journey. Digital Concierges provide guests with the conversational, contextual assistance and special attention that guests have come to expect from a traditional in-property concierge. Whether it s an inquiry about booking availability and room selection, pre-stay research, or inquiring about in-stay amenities, the Digital Concierge is always there and always ready to provide an answer. The digital concierge can help at every point in the guest s experience: Booking/Reservation - Property selection - Room rates - Upgrade requests - Using loyalty points - Adding/changing current booking Pre-Stay - Make bookings (spa, restaurant, car for the day, etc.) - Special requests (more pillows, a fan, bottle of Champagne in the room) - Trip planning - Add-ons - Adding an additional night s stay In-Stay - Make bookings (spa, restaurant, car for the day) - In-room requests - On property reservations - Concierge requests - Late check out Post-Stay - Feedback to the hotel - Missing Item inquiries - Loyalty points system information - Next stay discounts and promotions 2
How Technology Digitizes the Traditional Concierge The best guest experience solutions focus on endpoint technology features as the most crucial components for success. These features mimic the attributes of a traditional concierge to provide a conversational, contextual experience for guests: One persistent interaction: Once you know who the customer is, with one canonical thread you ll never lose the chat session like you would at the end of a typical web chat session. Past conversations will always be there, allowing both companies and customers to see the context behind any inquiry and everything chatted about in the past. Serving up information at the right time: As with any good concierge, listening to the guest and determining when to offer certain information makes the experience feel more personal and human. If a guest asks how long it takes to drive from a conference center to the hotel, for example, a concierge would supplement the answer with information on parking. Predicting the best time to provide information to a guest is necessary for delivering the optimal guest experience. Contextually relevant: The ability to understand the context behind a guest inquiry humanizes the guest experience. If a visitor in the pre-stay stage of their experience (booked but still researching) is, for example, on the Hilton Santa Fe property page in the app and asks, Can I bring my pet? The digital concierge can see that the visitor is on the Hilton Santa Fe page, know that pets are welcome, and provide a specific answer like, The Hilton Santa Fe property does allow pets. You can even add a Pampered Pet Package for $50 per stay. Click here to add this to your booking. By understanding the context of a guest inquiry, the system goes beyond the outdated keyword triggered automated systems that only provide general information. Provide one right answer: If a guest asked a concierge a question and she replied back with Here are six potential answers to that question. The guest would be left quite perplexed as to why they weren t just given the single answer they were looking for. Technology only provides multiple answers when it can t figure out what the guest is looking for. Delivering a digital concierge experience that uses natural language processing, predictive analytics, and machine learning to provide the one right answer to the guest the same way a traditional concierge would, is key. Then there are the unique technology features that provide a level of customization that goes beyond the traditional concierge. Retaining information: Every guest interaction will have a digital paper trail. This information can be used to provide benefits to the guest that traditional methods could not. If a guest enters specific preferences for a hotel stay, during their next stay that archived information can be used to present a notification asking if they d like the same special considerations they had last time. This gives guests the experience they want with no extra effort on their part. 3
The Power of Knowledge Many of the endpoint technology features listed above won t seem like ground-breaking discoveries. They ve existed for a while, and your hotel has most likely embraced some form of digital service already (even if it is just a website). The key to providing a truly digital concierge experience is not found in the endpoint features, but in the knowledge your company has. The system is only as smart as the information you feed it. The strength of the digital concierge is its ability to pull all of the data, across every source, to provide the best answer to the customer. There are three main sources of knowledge the digital concierge pulls from: Off-line brand knowledge: This is the long list of policies, procedures, brand information, and any other static information about your company. This is pro-actively uploaded into the system and used as the main foundation of information for the digital concierge. Guest CRM history/data: This is the detailed information you have on each individual guest. Where they ve stayed, how many loyalty points they ve accrued, or even what customizations they ve requested in the past. This information is how the digital concierge tailors the conversation to a guest s unique needs and brings it up to speed on their past interactions so customers won t ever have to repeat themselves. In the moment knowledge: This is the information captured from the app page itself. Which app pages the customer has recently visited or what questions they ve typed into the search bar are examples of in-themoment-knowledge that gives powerful insight into what the customer is trying to accomplish. This information is used to identify the intent of the customer inquiry. If a customer asks, Does that hotel allow pets? the digital concierge uses the in the moment knowledge to know exactly which property that hotel is. What makes the digital concierge truly unique is its ability to stitch together each of these three streams of data to deliver an intuitive and personalized experience that s contextually relevant to each individual guest. Your knowledge is the single most important asset that your organization has. Channel and device are irrelevant. The knowledge needs to be the same wherever your guests are, presenting a unified front for guests. By embracing CX technology that pulls from the same databases of knowledge, regardless of channel, the guest experience will feel more authentic. Guests will never be given misinformation or conflicting answers. Every guest is rewarded with a truly personalized experience. Help By Not Helping Your knowledge is the single most important asset that your organization has. Channel and device are irrelevant. The knowledge needs to be the same wherever your guests are. Not every guest interaction needs to be human assisted. Virtual agent technology can be seamlessly integrated into the digital concierge to deliver personalized self-serve experiences at scale. In fact, there are many cases where letting a guest self-serve is their preferred support method, for example, a guest trying to confirm the date/time of their stay. If a guest can use their smart phone or web device to engage with a virtual agent, it will be a smoother experience than if they had to call an agent and have her read out the information over the phone. 4
By using the virtual agent as a filter for all guest questions, you re able to free up reservation and customer agents as well as the on-site concierge to deal exclusively with the more complex problems that need human assistance. The on-site concierge becomes an escalation point within the digital concierge eradicating 20-30% of questions that would normally be sent over to the concierge. A virtual agent gives guests the option to find information on their own and then switch to an agent-assisted interaction only when necessary, all in one canonical thread of conversation. For hoteliers, this ends up reducing customer care costs and frees up the on-site concierge s time to be front and center, engaging with guests, and only dealing with the really hard problems that make the best use of their expertise. Let s walk through a sample guest experience to see this in action Simon has traveled from New York to London for a conference. Due to an unforeseen storm, Simon s flight has been delayed 3 hours. Rather than spend the time stuck in the airport, he decides to look into the check out time to see if he can stay at the hotel. 1 2 3 4 1. Simon logs in to the mobile app and clicks on Hotel Info. 2. He then asks the digital concierge when his check out time is. The virtual agent leverages its knowledge of Simon s booking, membership status, together with the hotel s policies captured from the page and provides the one right answer. Simon then asks the digital concierge about the hotel s late check out options. The virtual agent informs Simon that it will need to connect him with the front desk, to determine availability for late check out. With very little effort, Simon is connected with the front desk via chat to confirm late check out. 3. The front desk can see that Simon was inquiring about late check out and automatically knows what information to provide. 4. Within the same conversation thread, the front desk sends a rich media interactive card that visually shows his options and quickly lets him select one that best fits his needs. Simon makes a selection and receives a notification confirming his new check out date/time. Simon was able to modify his experience quickly and easily, right from his phone. The front desk was only brought into the interaction when necessary, giving them more time to assist other guests. 5
Embracing Digital Every guest has their own unique needs. Hospitality brands should provide a level of personalization to the experience that meets every guest s needs, whatever they may be, and where ever they are in their journey. The Digital Concierge serves as the very first entry-point to providing exceptional hospitality. With millions of guests, providing a uniquely personalized experience can feel very difficult, maybe even impossible. Traditional models lack the scalability necessary to make this goal a reality. With the Digital Concierge, utilizing the most modern technology, what was previously just wishful thinking is now well within reach for hoteliers. As the hospitality industry experiences increased pressure to adapt in order to compete against OTAs and thrive, intelligent guest experience technology opens the door to providing your guests the perfect, truly unique white glove experience that they both deserve and will come to expect. Guests are ready to embrace the digital concierge, are you? Ready to learn more about how [24]7 can provide hoteliers with a Digital Concierge that can help deliver scalable, differentiated white-glove experiences? Attend our webinar on September 22nd by clicking here. Let [24]7 help your organization achieve extraordinary results. Contact us today. About the Author Christopher Schyma VP, Hospitality and Travel at [24]7 c.schyma@247-inc.com +44 77 6694 4686 www.247-inc.com queries@247-inc.com USA +1 855.692.9247 CA +1 866.454.0084 UK +44 0 207 836 9203 AUS +61 2 90025780 About [24]7 [24]7 is redefining customer acquisition and engagement by making consumer intent the cornerstone of digital transformation. With intentdriven engagement, companies anticipate and act on consumer intent across any channel, collapsing the time to deliver successful outcomes in the moments that matter most. 6 1608AADigitalConcierge 2016 24/7 Customer, Inc. All Rights Reserved.