Summary - In the last five years, business world has seen the rise of Automation and Artificial Intelligence. Customer centric beauty and hotel industry have also braced the change. Today Spa and Salon appointment booking services and 24/7 hotel reservations call center services have started using varying degree of automation and artificial intelligence.
Front desk has remained the backbone of customer centric industries like beauty and hotels. How a client engages with the front desk of a Spa/Salon or a Hotel, usually is detrimental towards the robustness of revenue pipeline. Traditionally Spa and Salon Call Center Services or in case of a hotel, 24/7 hotel reservation call center services have been used by enterprises to give a boost to the front desk operations. When the enterprises have felt that their customers feel special if they interact with the brand in their mother tongue, they have gone for successful deployment of multilingual and bilingual call centers, where there are options for a patron to converse in any global language, including English.
For starters, let us take the case of Spa and Salon industry. When an enterprise operating in this industry has deployed specialist Spa and Salon appointment booking services, they have demonstrated a measurable impact on client engagement matrix. This matrix has customer experience and customer satisfaction as two guiding dimensions. Spa and Salon Call Center Services Company have teams who are domain experts and have high degree of proficiency as far as up-selling and cross-selling is concerned. This directly translates into revenue dollars for the parent enterprise.
In late 2019 Just a year ago, when the pandemic called Corona hit the world, the Hospitality and Beauty industries globally got impacted to such levels that their total traction came to a screeching halt. There was a devastating impact on customer footfalls and whatever trickle was still left, remained underserved due to staff paucity. Even today you feel the effect the tight lockdown conditions and the resultant social distancing measures had on the smooth running of enterprises. You see many enterprises advertising vacant positions but the takers are none. Small business owners of Hotels, Spas, and Salons have been on their wit’s end to figure out the `new normal’ of conducting business. How do you keep your shutters up and businesses running amidst these constricting circumstances? These were the times when some of them experimented with 24/7 hotel reservations call center services, which gave the customer access to the front desk any hour of the day, and location or office timing didn’t remain a bottleneck. There was a similar leaning towards Spa and Salon appointment booking services and the idea was to get similar results.
There were plethora of other measures as well which were adopted by small enterprises. These included, but were not limited to the introduction of automation up to a degree for legacy business practices like front desk operations. Since time immemorial, for any hotel, spa, or salon front desks traditionally have been the first layer of interaction for a walk-in prospect or a regular patron. The ensuing interactions with a well-trained front desk staff have been signals for a client to form impressions regarding the expected service levels. From the introduction to quality and range of services on offer, up-selling and cross-selling of products and services, ensuring buy-ins for ongoing marketing schemes, making reservations, or scheduling appointments, have been the forte of a good service front desk. A good desk is instrumental in the smooth running of the entire enterprise whereas a great one is necessary for achieving exponential growth in the business. 24/7 hotel reservations call center services achieved these objectives to the T and graciously got the job done.
As mentioned earlier, staff paucity has remained one key challenge in smooth running of the operations. To counter this small and medium business enterprises in hotels, spas, and salons across the world adopted a measure which is to segregate `service communication’ and `service delivery’. When it came to service communication, apart from deploying bilingual call centers and multilingual call centers, automated chatbots started getting introduced. Let us take a minute to understand as to what are these chatbots. Automated chatbots are simple software programs that can pick up answers from a predefined response bucket, without human supervision.
When it comes to service delivery trained in-house domain experts are mandatory, `service communication’ can be improved upon for both cost and efficiency. To support multilingual call centers, there is incremental use of chat-bots and outsourced call center services providing live chat support to deliver superlative performances on this front. Let us further explore both these types and analyze their merits and challenges.
Chatbots are essentially computer programs that are designed to simulate conversations with humans. They function effectively over a user interface like a customer’s website or an app. They follow a certain set of `what-if’ and `if-this-then-that’ instructions built into the program using business logic. There is a range of highly developed chatbots also. These advanced chatbots can also utilize cutting-edge technologies like Artificial Intelligence (where the spectrum of responses can increase significantly utilizing multiple data points) and Machine Learning (where the program can essentially keep teaching itself, based on past experiences without any human intervention). When deployed over a 24/7 hotel reservations call center services or Spa and Salon Call Center Services, they are known to give better results than what is normally expected from pure analog operations.
Chatbots have been here for a while and they are not a new concept. Just browse through few pages on the internet and you will find out that hospitality industry began experimenting with chatbots about a decade ago when Facebook’s messenger service took the world by storm and allowed images and emojis as well as call-to-action within the chat window. Radisson Blue Edwardian came up with a chatbot called “Edward” in 2015. This automated bot helped the guests throughout their stay through consistent messaging and also lent a helping hand at the time of check-out.
As mentioned earlier, when used in conjunction with Spa and Salon Call Center Services or 24/7 hotel reservations call center services Chat-bots have showcased many positives which include providing guests 24/7 real-time and on-demand customized information, reminders, recommendations, suggestions, and solutions starting from check-in to check-out. They are also utilized for cross-selling and up-selling additional goods and services.
Chatbots do have limitations when outlier queries are fed to them. When it comes to providing a meaningful response to even ordinary human queries, chatbots more often than not showcase their inability to perform beyond fed instructions.