Actionable advice on the sales processes that hoteliers should put in place to maximize the direct booking potential of their hotel chatbot.
You can have the best chatbot for hotels in the universe. However, if you do not have the right management processes, you won’t be able to get all the value that your hotel chatbot can generate for you.
This is not a question about having a big or a small team. The only question that matters is – do you have the right processes in place?
The following action plan outlines the sales processes you need to apply if you want to maximize the ROI of your hotel chatbot. They are simple and easy to implement in your properties to make sure that you get the returns you expect from your hotel chatbot.
Objectives
The first thing is to have very clear objectives:
- Sales: +30K€/year direct sales (target calculated per 100 rooms)
- Operations: Filter and automatically respond to frequent requests
- Customer service: Offer personalized, instant service
Why trust this action plan?
Everything in this practical guide has been tested in hotels across the world and has been proven to work in all hotels, big and small.
— We have a solid tech: Quicktext in 2 min
— We’ve done it successfully for other hotels
- Customers’ testimonials
- Customer feedback from Hotel tech report
Action plan
Out of 100 customers who visit your website, 49% are interested and want to know your prices. Yet only 9% arrive on your booking engine and only 2% eventually book (Fastbooking 2018 study).
Quicktext exists to help you increase direct sales by engaging and retaining your customers in your hotel’s direct booking funnel.
Recommended tool: Quicktext hotel chatbot for direct sales
Quicktext is an AI-powered chatbot solution for the hospitality industry. It was designed to facilitate direct sales in hotels by engaging potential customers in a conversation. Quicktext offers a chatbot equipped with artificial intelligence called Zalia. Quicktext also provides a platform that centralizes all instant communication channels a hotel needs to interact with its customers in a mobile-first era.
The Quicktext hotel chatbot action
— Delivers answers on over 200 topics related to your hotel and its surroundings
— Reduces the barrier to entry into your conversion funnel
— Increases your direct conversion rate
Expected financial performance of your hotel chatbot:
+120K€/year in reservation requests per 100 rooms
+30K€ of turnover realized on average or 25% conversion rate (observation conducted on a representative sample of 200 independent hotels in Europe and the US)
Actions expected from your hotel chatbot:
— Zalia chatbot for hotels captures: Name, email, mobile number, dates of stay, number of adults, number of children, and makes an offer via the booking engine
— The customer is invited to finish the purchase directly in your booking engine
— Zalia informs your sales team according to their preferences
– Visual notification
– An email notification with a summary of the request
– Global request report
— Possible scenarios
- The conversation goes well, directly to the booking engine without the intervention of your sales team
- The conversation goes well, but the customer does not close the sale in the booking engine => Zalia notifies the sales team and provides all the necessary details to help your team close the deal
- Zalia does not understand the request, takes the customer’s contact details, indicates a time period within which the sales team will return to the customer based on the time the request is made => Zalia provides all the contact information to the sales team to close the deal
Actions expected from your sales team
Artificial intelligence setup and calibration
Your hotel chatbot’s answers are calibrated by your sales team. For each subject, Zalia chatbot can offer you a template answer or you can customize the answers according to the specific tone you want to give. Template answers are a base that will get you live, but you might need to enrich.
(More info: make your hotel chatbot successful )
Sales material provided by your hotel chatbot
In the event of a reservation request, Zalia chatbot can do 2 things:
1- Simple booking requests: Zalia will present the customer with prices, availabilities, and the possibility to book a room. Sometimes this won’t be enough because hotel rooms are expensive and a follow-up process can be necessary.
2- Complex booking requests (groups and customers with flexible dates): Zalia captures all the necessary information and informs the customer that the hotel’s sales team will follow-up soon.
In both cases, Zalia instantly notifies the sales team.
- Your hotel chatbot will provide your team with qualified leads defined by:
- Name
- Mobile number
- Dates of stay
- Number of adults
- Number of children
You must use this information to follow-up on all customer requests that did not convert automatically. Your target must be at least 25% conversion rate.
Sales follow-up expected from your sales team
2 scenarios are possible:
- A member of your team can take control of the chatbot instantly if necessary. Good for you. A powerful notification system is available. This will send an alert to your human agents with visual sound and email notifications when action is required.
- You have no one to take over your hotel chatbot. Real-time is great but realistically, it is not always possible for your staff to react instantly and it is OK. Most questions are going to be answered by your hotel chatbot and questions that need human attention will be answered ASAP by your team via SMS or email. Since you have all the customer’s information, it is easy to follow-up even if a couple of hours have passed.
— A member of the sales team checks the booking request report provided by your hotel chatbot at least once a day (say at 4 PM) to make sure all demands are taken care of.
— Possible scenarios
- The sale converted via the booking engine automatically => No action required
- The sale did not convert through the booking engine => Implementation of a commercial follow-up process (email, phone, SMS – your choice)
— Set up a toolbox: What are the sales tools that your team can use to personalize offers based on customer information gained through your hotel chatbot? The idea is to make your offer more relevant than your competitors’.
– Create urgency: your offer must be limited in time
– List of perks that you can bring up to make the conversion easier and share it with your hotel staff. The following are just examples
– Each hotel has its own context and associated benefits:
– Families: Family rooms, connecting rooms, extra bed, activities, breakfast, special prices for kids, maybe even free breakfast for small kids
– Couple: A drink at the bar, small welcome bottle, spa offer
– Infants: Baby cot, bottle warmer
– Long distance: How can you make the transfer easy, reinforce security, flexible check-in/out
– Pets: Basket, food
— Make email templates to save time. The 4 main topics that you’ll encounter are reservation, confirmation, modification and cancellation requests. For reservation your template structure should be like this:
– Respond to the customer’s request
– Make an offer (using the toolbox)
– Insert a call to action: Link to the booking engine
– (Optional) Indicate the next step if there is no answer after a certain amount of time
Measure success
– Number of conversations
– Number of reservation requests taken by the chatbot (Lead generation)
– Number of reservations taken by the booking engine (conversion role of the booking engine)
– Number of follow-ups by the sales team
– Conversion of the follow-ups
– See detailed article on chatbot KPIs here
If you’d like to discuss sales processes to maximize the ROI of your hotel chatbot or have any questions about artificial intelligence in hospitality, please visit our website or contact Benjamin Devisme at bde@quicktext.im.
