The front-desk at a hotel is buzzing with customer activity – From reservations to customer requests, front-desk staff are constantly interacting with the guests when several guest queries are thrown at them. And this can lead to frustrating wait times for customers wherein guests queue up to find answers to their concerns and queries.
Chatbots and RPA fit in in the way they automate the front-desk tasks, for instance, facilitate enriched guest experience and win happy customers in turn. Apparently, the largest hospitality chain/aggregator thriving without any hotels under its banner is just the testimonial evidence of technology propping up the hospitality industry in catering to the demanding customer and their evolving expectations.
Spoilt for choice, today, customers root for tech-savvy hospitality partners, who not only provide value for money but also assure superlative customer experience. And when guests are made to go through enriching experience, they turn into brand ambassadors landing on various social platforms to promote the brand and when they feel let down, they don’t think twice to gripe.
With automation, hospitality industry has the weapon it needs to empower customers. By providing them with a self-service portal, automating operations such as loyalty rewards programmes, self-check-in/out, cancellation, spa booking, laundry, loyalty car and other services, hotels can pave the way for personalised experiences.
Sample the ‘Extra Mile’ in Hospitality Industry
Let’s cover the story of a famous US hotel chain. They got initiated with a customer-tracking software to understand customers better. A customer checks into one of their hotels in the US and makes a request for an extra feather pillow and a Budweiser beer. After a few weeks, the customer visits a hotel belonging to the same chain at Belgium – And to the customer’s surprise, there is an extra feather pillow on the bed along with good stock of Budweiser beer spotted in the minibar.
The above story shows how the hotel went the extra mile to please a customer through automation. Where there is talk of automation, RPA is not far behind.
Hotels leveraging RPA
RPA bots have left their mark in guiding hotels improve guest experience. For instance, RPA bots now serve well to automate tasks performed by the hotel staff, reducing guest service time in the process, facilitate quick front-desk response to guest queries and concerns, do away with the guest wait-time, thereby making guests happy and contended. Reaping benefits out of RPA, hotels are now doing away with the manual labour and reducing time taken to pull information related to reservation as well as loyalty reward program and ensuring that daily duties are performed at great speed.
Take the employee labour of processing invoices, bills as well as claims that pile up during a month. Leveraging RPA, hotels are now automating these repetitive and mundane tasks, automating tasks such as the copy-pasting of data, movement of files from one place to another, among others. RPA bots have made the difference in the way they have enabled accurate and faster results, eliminated errors, and allowed cost-effective deployment.
Hospitality Areas and RPA difference
RPA has made a great difference in areas such as customer experience and internal processes.
Customer experience
Let’s say that a guest wants to know the menu for the next-day. Chatbot can be pressed into service to offer relevant answer to this query. Chatbots can respond to customer queries all through the day. By promoting, self-service kiosks, hotels have found the right ally to ensure customer experience improves by a notch.
The intelligent bot also reads customer preferences – where customer requirements are pre-booked using the bot and made available when the customer checks in to a hotel. RPA enhances guest experience by enabling automated concierge services, facilitating booking of vehicles to be picked up as well as dropped at the airport as well as automated loyalty management programmes.
Streamlining Internal Process
When it comes to internal processes, RPA leads the way to enable automated invoicing thereby saving manual labour and automation of payment follow-up when it comes to corporate bookings. Hotels also leverage RPA in order to streamline recruitment process, automate leave preparation and strengthen support across front office accounts, management, back office, maintenance, reception, housekeeping, kitchen and inventory.
With RPA accelerating intelligent automation across operations, hospitality industry has found the right ally to create enriching experiences for guests, win loyal customers, and enhance employee productivity, cut down human errors and save cost.
