Mallorcan hotel chain PortBlue Hotel Group takes advantage of the possibilities provided by AI to increase its direct sales and offer instant customer service.
PortBlue is one of the chains that have used COVID times to think, change and adapt to the expectations of digital customers.
Interview with Jasnina Schramm, Direct Sales & Marketing Manager at PortBlue Hotels & Resorts.
Where does digitalization fit into PortBlue Hotel Group’s corporate philosophy and how does it apply to the user experience?
Digitalization is part of our company’s DNA and we are constantly analyzing our customers’ journey to optimize communication through the points of contact they use to reach out to us.
At PortBlue Hotel Group, we start from a system architecture made up of isolated blocks. Our absolute priority and biggest challenge over the last 2-3 years has been to ensure that the components of our tech ecosystem connect to each other in order to create synergies, and make the whole more than the sum of its parts.
In 2022, we decided to adopt artificial intelligence to open up more to our customers.
In previous years, we have improved our infrastructure and internal processes. In 2022, we are focused on improving the customer experience by investing in being more efficient in the key points of contact we use.
We believe in the importance of digitalization in the hospitality industry, not to mechanize the service but to be able to:
- Quickly resolve frequent requests which is what the customer values most.
- Focus our human resources on resolving complex and high-value requests for the customer.
We put the customer at the center of our direct sales strategy.
- We are present and available to them on the web but also on other direct mobile channels.
- We offer our customers recognition and fast personalized service.
Major investments:
- Launch of a new corporate website. The goal is to modernize and improve the positioning of our PortBlue Hotel Group brand, facilitate navigation and user experience, as well as improve organic positioning and conversion rates.
- We will be much more proactively covering conversational channels with the help of Quicktext’s artificial intelligence, which allows us to automatically and instantly respond to customer requests via webchat, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Google My Business chat features.
Why did we decide to work with Quicktext?
After analyzing the different options available in the market we chose Quicktext for a number of factors.
- Support: We never used an AI system before so it was decisive for us that the Quicktext team provided us with impeccable service and effectively accompanied us in a very proactive way which made the implementation much easier and saved us many hours of work.
- Functionality: Quicktext is not limited to the hotel chatbot part but uses the information captured in the conversations to feed our sales (proactive commercial follow-up and retargeting) and operational processes.
ROI: We can comprehensively measure all interactions and conversions through our chat, we believe it was a completely natural step within our strategy. In addition, beyond being a sales channel, we rely on the benefits of this solution to analyze the most frequent customer queries and make this information more accessible.
