The hotel business is becoming one of the most sought after business opportunities these days. With the economy booming and the travel industry skyrocketing, the hotel business industry is catching up with new trends that are bringing revolutions in the market.
Hotels are being booked by all kinds of people from industries such as business travelers, tourists, young entrepreneurs, photographers, movie crews etc.
The hotel industry is witnessing a spike in its business. Market analysts suggest that this trend in the hotel business is likely to continue for a significant number of coming years.
Factors such as reasonable accommodation and befitting budget are the major reasons why hotels have grasped the attention of technology, for improvement.
Technology has helped hotels achieve higher levels of customer satisfaction and delight along with increased profits. But a lack of professionalism and other factors leave a bad reputation, even to a luxury hotel.
It takes 12 positive experiences to make up for one unresolved negative experience.
Interactive Voice response or (IVR) is a telephony system that provides a menu and routes the callers to the appropriate members of your team who are dedicated to handling their query.
It is based on a smart segmentation system that takes input from the caller through the keypad and segments that request to the appropriate customer service person.
Let us have a look at how IVR is booming the hotel industry and solving their basic issues:
Having a toll free number immediately boosts your identity as a professional hotel business. Especially, if you are not physically present at your hotel at all times, a toll-free number can add tremendous value to your branding efforts.
It can help you get more potential customers as people think of your brand as a well-established business. With technology add-ons, you can have your toll free number greet your customers with voice messages that are pre recorded in your voice.
Many research studies have found that a toll-free number can improve sales by 30%.
There is always a virtual assistant present to ask the name and other details from the customer. Advanced systems can also facilitate by providing dynamic greetings to your customers by addressing them by the name. Surely, it would make your customer feel comfortable and impart a sense of warmth.
Personalization works in wonderful ways because customers love getting attention. They simply do not want to feel like they are just a number in your long list.
Any hotel should ease out their customer query from the very first interaction with the customer that usually happens over the telephone.
Statistics suggest that most of the hotels fail to make their impacts and showcase professionalism while talking to customers over the telephone. This leaves a negative first impression, ultimately damaging the reputation of the hotel.
Maintaining an entire call center for handling customer calls can be quite a tedious process. It would require skilled professionals with proper infrastructural setup. The employees would also have to work round the clock.
IVR comes to the rescue for the hotel industry at this point. IVR facilitates hotel by providing the customers with professional call experience along with being cost effective. The hotel services and branches can be centralized, again providing ease of access to the customer.
Hotel management can also send polls and surveys to their customers using interactive voice response. The IVR calls the customer to get their feedbacks and with the help of DTMF tones or voice recognition, responses can be gathered.
This will help the hotels access customer satisfaction level and optimize hotel services accordingly.
The hotel industry runs 24 hours and 7 days a week. There is no stopping or end to the reservations or customer queries. Imagine how much manpower and infrastructure would it require running a customer service center 24*7 for your hotel business.
With an automated voice mechanism to take care of these needs, a large amount of money can be saved. This slashes down your cost that would have been required in a traditional telephony system.
Statistics reveal that about 40% of the calls made by first-time customers are not picked up.
The IVR system allows hotel businesses to efficiently manage a large volume of calls. The customers, who are the callers, are easily directed to the dedicated department or customer service staff to assist their issues.
This leaves a professional and smooth experience for the customer along with improving your company image.
Consider monitoring a thousand calls in a traditional telephony system. Not only would it increase the burden but would also require a large amount of time. Interactive voice response is easy to manage and relieves a significant burden from your business.
Since every business needs to run regular and timely quality checks against their customer service team, IVR helps in easy quality check, no matter where you are. Therefore, it is not always necessary for the higher management to be present for the quality check manually.
The hotel manager or director of various hotels like MangoMist download a few call recordings from the IVR and listen to them. As listening to each and every single call is a tedious and time taking task, they pick a few randomly recorded calls.
If they find a room for improvement by listening to a particular call, they immediately pass the learning to their respective representatives and team.
Thus, using IVR provides a vast range of opportunities to hotel businesses. It increases the first contact resolution. Unlike orthodox telephony systems, IVR increases the customer service efficiency that ultimately leads to the efficacy of the support staff and the hotel. The hotels can relax on increased professionalism and reduced operational costs. And not to forget, all this leads to an everlasting customer satisfaction.
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