During the guest stay, however, the industry for the most part depends on human interaction to provide the customer delight element. While this has worked well over the years, with the onset of the Covid pandemic era, these same human interactions have become challenges – both for guests and the hotels in question. The first wave of the pandemic saw the shuttering of many properties as part of government initiatives to minimize the risk of Covid spread. While the realities of the situation are not lost on anyone, it did pose a challenge for the hospitality industry as a whole, which has huge overheads, and often not enough liquidity to afford to shutter properties for months on end.

While sanitization and spacing measures have brought a bit of parity to the equation, the challenges that come with face-to-face interactions do continue. Looking beyond the Covid aspect of things, many business guests prefer to minimize the waiting period they have to endure at the front desk, and the tedious procedure of raising complaints when something is not right in their rooms. Conversational automation tailored for the ‘In-room’ stay of guests can help solve these issues and help improve guest experiences across the board.

Most leading hospitality companies have mobile apps, loyalty programs, and virtual assistants in some shape or form. Many of these mobile apps have quick links to FAQs, can provide directions to the property, and help with check-in. Adding conversational automation to the mix can ease the guest experience on these apps. When a guest is at the hotel the Virtual Assistants can answer any questions that come in: What time is breakfast? What time does the pool open? Can I have a late checkout? Virtual Assistant answering these queries can provide guests with an instant and reliable medium where they can fire off these questions and get the details they need at the moment – alleviating the strain of searching through a mobile app or website for answers, or the load on call centres where any guest calls would land, or even the in-house staff who can instead focus on providing greater service experience at other touchpoints.

The scope of guest experience that can be delivered by these conversational assistants – either as chatbots, mobile applications, or voice assistants on Alexa or Google devices in the rooms – is quite varied. Listed below are some ways that conversational assistants can help during the stay of the guest at the property:

• Guest Stay Management: Just imagine being a guest arriving at the hotel lobby post a long flight, and being able to check-in on your phone without the hassle of stopping at the front desk. Similarly, a chatbot can speed up any updates related to a guest stay, such as notification that the room is available, or reminders about the property’s check-out policy.
• Cross and Up-selling: Piggybacking conversational assistants with machine learning algorithms and integration with guest loyalty profiles can allow them to cross and up-sell services to the guests. Through the analysis of previous interactions with a guest, a chatbot could send relevant offers at the right time, such as special offers at the restaurant or spa.
• Ordering and Tracking: Chatbots can also be used to order room service meals – all the way from providing the food menu, to enabling guests to click and order with integrations to the hotel’s systems and payment gateways to accept payment. The chatbot can also update the guest on how long the meal order will take and proffer custom recommendations.
• Special Requests: Chatbots can be trained on the amenities provided by the property so they can receive and pass on special requests from guests to the relevant staff – from extra pillow requests to anniversary special arrangements in the room. Chatbots can even be used to set wake up calls or notify guests of any spa, golf, or dinner reservations they may have made.
• Complaints and Ticketing: Guests often have complaints about their rooms or some aspect of their stay. Chatbots can be integrated within the back-end systems so that maintenance is receiving those complaints about leaky showers, or lack of toiletries.

Responding to guest requirements in real-time, while the guest is still on the premises to benefit, boosts satisfaction and creates great experiences. Conversational automation, either through voice assistants or chatbots can provide hospitality companies with the perfect vessel to ensure these improvements in guest experiences.

IGT Solutions has a robust Intelligent Automation Practice with over 4 years of delivering excellence in process and conversational automation, with a special focus on enhancing customer experience. The practice has deployed solutions around bookings and cancellations in the hospitality space, alongside FAQ chatbots. The team has also partnered with hospitality clients to build voice bot solutions for guests calling in to the contact centre. Through the delivery of conversational automation, IGT has helped clients achieve 35% channel deflection, 15% IVR containment, 20% increase in CSAT and 25% improvement in Net promoter scores.

Author:

Nandhagopal Muralithar is a Senior Business Consultant at IGT Solutions’ Intelligent Automation and Analytics Practice. With specialized experience of 7 years in Digital Transformation Consulting across Travel, Hospitality and Retail domains, Nandh has worked extensively on the front edge of process and conversational automation technologies, designing and delivering innovative back and front office automation solutions.

The post Enhancing Guest Experience with In-Room Virtual Assistant appeared first on IGT Solutions.

Hotel contact centres are the backbone of hospitality operations and play a vital role in providing round-the clock support to ensure customer needs are being met promptly and accurately. The good quality of service encourages repeat business, increased referrals, opportunity to cross sell and up-sell, customer satisfaction and a boost in profitability. In the hotel industry, contact centres are crucial because of the demanding nature of the business and the need for consistently increasing operational efficiency.

Given that the primary driver of the hospitality industry is guest experience, contact centre agents should spend most of their time providing accurate and quick resolutions to customer queries. However, the majority of the agent time goes into the mundane task of pulling information from different systems and carrying out manual repetitive back office tasks when responding to customer queries. While handling complex customer queries, contact centre agents have to put customers on hold when searching for answers across different systems and documents, which is tedious and time consuming. This increases the AHT and irritates the customer, and leads to customer dissatisfaction and potential revenue loss for the hotel. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) as a technology can be of great help to contact centre agents in this scenario where retrieval of details is required from multiple systems. Attended RPA bots can be deployed on systems of contact centre agents to help them gather information required to resolve customer queries from different systems with the simple click of a button.

RPA bots can be used in hotel contact centres in the following areas to assist agents and enhance overall productivity:

• Bookings: RPA can be used to automate the booking process from start to finish. The vendors or partners send details to the contact centre for bookings or cancellations and bots can be used to create or cancel bookings on reservation systems.
• Analysis of customer feedback and reviews: Customer reviews play an important part in improving service and standards. The RPA bot can extract reviews, analyse them and send a prompt response to the customer depending on the review.
• Notification to customers: Providing regular updates to the customers is a key aspect of the hospitality industry. This can be easily managed using RPA, the bots can be used to send timely updates to the customers for a better experience.
• Back office operations: Repetitive and high volume back end processes like invoice processing, claims processing and bill generation can easily be automated using RPA to save agent time and reduce human errors.
• Reporting: The bots can swiftly extract and organize data from multiple sources and systems to generate reports to provide better insights of performance and identification of areas for improvement.

The role of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) as a technology in hotel contact centres has increased significantly in the last few years. Many contact centres are implementing RPA solutions to improve the customer experience, enhance efficiency and increase productivity.

The following are the key benefits of using RPA in hotel contact centres:

• Time Saving: The RPA bots can gather information from multiple systems in no time leading to reduced wait time on calls.
• Improved Accuracy and Compliance: The manual errors will reduce as BOTs are more consistent and process with 100 percent accuracy.
• Reduce Operational Expenses: RPA bots can work 24/7 and process transactions faster compared to a human agent leading to reduced operational costs.

IGT Solutions Intelligent Automation practice has worked with many hospitality companies by providing automation solutions to improve efficiency and reduce operational cost in contact centres. Over the last couple of years, IGT solutions has worked with two leading hotel groups in Europe and USA respectively and automated processes in the contact centre such as guest booking confirmation, contract loading, updating metasearch commissions and auto-response to customer reviews which has helped these clients to save over $2M in the last 2 years.

Author:

Nischal Guleria is a Senior Business Consultant at IGT Solutions’ Intelligent Automation Practice. He has an extensive experience in process automation using RPA for Travel, Hospitality and Finance domains. Outside of work, he loves travelling and walking. He can be reached at Nischal.Guleria@igtsolutions.azurewebsites.net

The post Boosting efficiency in the Hotel contact centre through agent-assist bots appeared first on IGT Solutions.

Before Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
Depending on the procedures, protocols, and infrastructures of each institution, steps to process debit or credit card fraud significantly varied. Still, certain steps used to be followed, namely, collection of disputed transaction data from the web-based core banking system; gathering and investigating of information associated with the claim; and processing of the debit/credit card fraud disputes via CMS – card management system.

Without the help of technology or automated solutions, every single step would be conducted manually, from data gathering and data processing to decision making. For some banking institutions, transactions could be handled by batch, while for others, they needed to be resolved separately. This traditional method was not only time-consuming, discouraging, repetitive and overwhelming for workers but was also prone to more errors. Given the fact that there were thousands of card fraud claims per day, it was a challenging task for financial institutions to ensure accuracy and speed through conventional techniques, most of which were based on human intervention.

After Robotic Process Automation

Data Gathering: Collecting information on disputed transactions is the first and foremost step bank employees have to follow. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solutions can help navigate and log into the web-based system of the bank, select a date range, and export the transaction data. To gather additional information from numerous internal databases or public domains to give a holistic view of customer data for fraud analysts robots can be utilized.

Data Processing: After relevant data is captured, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can assist bank employees in removing duplicates, and formatting and refining data to make it fit for use. When this automation solution is combined with Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies such as Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), Text Analytics, and Machine Learning (ML); the robot can track activities, collate payments, determine anomalies, and identify fraud patterns. Apart from freeing up humans from repetitive and monotonous tasks, RPA also ensures higher accuracy and enhanced productivity, as it can self-learn from previous cases, thereby reducing time spent on subsequent disputes at most.

Decision Making: RPA has revolutionized the back-end operations of banking organizations, and debit/credit card fraud processing is not an exception. The automation solution has been able to significantly reduce costs while easing financial employee workloads, as well as increasing the quality of fraud processing and minimizing the number of human error-related issues. While the issues faced by financial institutions in detecting and processing fraudulent card transactions may continue in the future, Robotic Process Automation, more or less, can empower efficiency in resolving these challenges.

About IGT in RPA
IGT Solutions has an extensive experience in back/front office automation leveraging Robotic Process Automation (RPA) as the means to automate business processes which are high volume, repetitive, prone to human error and come with stringent regulatory compliances. The tasks can include queries, calculations, reports and maintenance of records and transactions.
IGT has a team of RPA specialists who have successfully automated processes for some of the major players across industries.

Author:

Himanshu Gandhi is a Project Manager at IGT Solution’s Robotic Process Automation (RPA). He has 14 years of diverse work experience as a Senior Consultant and Project Manager for Digital Transformation across Airlines, Food and Beverage, and Banking industry. He can be reached at Himanshu.gandhi@igtsolutions.azurewebsites.net.

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