How Breakthroughs in Hotel Booking Tech Can Create Massive Shifts in Customer Loyalty + Ensure a Seamless Customer Experience

As people continue to make up for lost vacation time post-pandemic, 2022 was filled with stories of delayed and disappointing travel experiences. Meanwhile, consumers now have higher hopes and expectations for their vacations than ever before. 2023 can be a transformative year for hotels and guests alike, but only if the industry learns from past experiences and moves towards a more seamless travel experience for all. 

After the pandemic, 60% of customers have higher expectations for their customer experience. Despite an increase in demand, travel and hotel brands are expected to exceed customer expectations and provide services that are convenient, immediate and personalized or risk customers jumping ship. Zendesk data shows that 61% of consumers will abandon brands after just one bad experience. 

Across every type of travel, customers have similar expectations: fast, immediate support, convenience, personalization, safety, and reliability. But delivering a great customer experience for travelers can be complicated. There are a slew of challenges that hotel brands face to meet these expectations. From the urgency of issues, to whether or not they’re able to provide on-the-go support, to multiple parties to coordinate across, to uncontrollable external factors (including weather and traffic), to many disconnected systems, there's a lot to be on top of. 

Maintaining customer loyalty

To keep travelers happy and help maintain loyalty, utilizing the proper support software that sets your teams up for success can mean all the difference. Give agents the customer context they need to provide personalized service across any channel with a unified agent workspace through an open, flexible platform. Technology plays a major role in ensuring travelers stay lifelong customers beyond booking. 

Customers don’t want to repeat themselves. Connecting all parties to a single conversation where agents understand the previous context better assists everyone. Hotels can alleviate stress for the agent and customer alike by moving from transactional one-off exchanges to ongoing conversations.

And when things do go wrong, best-in-class hotel experiences anticipate issues and proactively reach out to customers to make them feel appreciated. Reaching out to customers on the channel of their preference ahead of time can make for a smooth resolution.

Self-service is a quick, direct way for people to solve their own problems. A robust knowledge base powered by AI can help travelers help themselves and can answer their questions when there isn’t someone available to help and can free up agent time to focus on more pressing issues. 

Employing a system that enforces SLAs and escalations, allows hotels to provide support more quickly and effectively. Hotel brands can empower agents via notification APIs to achieve these SLAs and personalize their customer service offerings by building a unified messaging and digital concierge experience across all channels. 

Notification APIs save the day

Hotels can send proactive messages via notification APIs to offer room upgrades prior to check-in. Customers can then engage with their own terms using the channels they already use (including WhatsApp or Messenger, as well as email, phone, and more) and route messages to the correct local staff members.  Hotel brands deliver personalized customer experiences at scale by adopting a streamlined API that gets the customer to the right service group to fast track their response and keep the technical load to a minimum.

Booking a hotel room can be more seamless than ever with innovative customer relationship software and predictive analytics. From discovery through booking and post-stay, there’s an opportunity for the hospitality industry to reimagine the new guest relationship. With the proper tools, every agent becomes extraordinary by managing conversations, and collaborating to provide fast, personalized service. 

The Four Seasons customer experience team has revolutionized the hospitality industry by personalizing the guest experience at over 100 hotel locations, across 10 distinct channels and several languages. Through transformative technology and use of notification APIs, the Four Seasons customer service team is able to build a seamless and consistent global customer experience. Guests can now quickly interact with the appropriate guest services, offloading work for the agents to try to connect with various departments With faster resolution time, the Four Seasons team saw their guest satisfaction scores grow substantially.

The bottom line

Travelers can now connect with a hotel based on their preferred messaging channels and gain a new and improved hospitality experience incorporating swift and personal support, in turn making life easier for hotel management and employees. From powering a digital concierge to incorporating a multilanguage hyper growth strategy; hotels are now not able to only personalized guest experience but insights about guest preferences that can inform their opportunities to improve the offerings and average spend. This is just the beginning of breakthrough technology for the travel industry.

The most successful hotel businesses infuse great customer experiences into everything they do, and technology can provide endless possibilities to ensure these exceptional experiences. As customer experience teams refine their strategy in the new year, it is important to utilize these affordances to ensure guest loyalty for years to come. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Teresa Anania is Vice President of Customer Experience at Zendesk, a service-first CRM company that builds support, sales, and customer engagement software designed to foster better customer relationships.