6 Ways to Boost Your Hospitality Contact Centre with GenAI

John Ortiz at MiaRec explores six ways in which Generative AI-based contact centre solutions will not only help, but also gave a dramatic impact on your contact centre performance. 

Are you struggling with low CSAT scores in your hospitality contact centre? Are you looking for ways to automate your contact centre processes and start using AI to eliminate some of your biggest pain points?

If you feel a little hesitant about AI or don’t know where to start with contact centre AI, this article is for you. All of the suggestions below are easy and quick ROI ways to dip your toes into utilizing AI in your contact centre!

Get 100% QA Coverage, Even During The Busy Holiday Season

Most hospitality businesses are currently manually evaluating their agents’ performance. This means a QA team will pick a call (often at random, for lack of a better way) and re-listen to it while scoring their performance based on an Excel-based or other type of manual scorecard.

Because this is not only time-consuming, labour-intensive, and inefficient but also results in low CSAT scores and poor customer experiences, many hotels, restaurants, theme parks, and other hospitality companies are looking to automate the process.

You could automate your QA process and score 100% of the relevant calls automatically based on a customizable scorecard tailored to your needs.

This gives you much more visibility into what is happening in your contact centre and instantly lets you identify those calls that require human follow-up or further investigation, e.g., those calls that fall below a predefined performance or sentiment analysis score, or calls in which competitors are mentioned (see below).

In addition, hotels and other hospitality businesses experience seasonal spikes in inquiries, resulting in contact centres struggling to scale their quality monitoring efforts to match increased call volumes. Auto QA ensures 100% coverage, even during peak seasons.

Automatically Flag Calls That Mention Competitors

The hospitality business is highly competitive, and many of the companies we spoke to mentioned that they are losing business to their competitors. The thing is, some of the attrition is preventable.

Through a manual review of call recordings, these hotel chains and other larger hospitality businesses found that their customers were mentioning competitors, e.g., “Hotel X is cheaper than the price you just offered me,” or “Why would I stay with you if I can stay at [competitor] for less?”

With Generative AI-based Topical Analysis, you can automatically identify every call that mentions a competitor. In addition, because Generative AI understands the context of the conversation, it will add a few key topics to the metadata of the call.

This allows you to instantly filter your calls by competitors mentioned and see in which context they were mentioned. For example, customers announce that they want to cancel their reservation because they got offered an upgrade for the same price at hotel XXX.

Or they complain that the hotel they are staying has ongoing construction and they would like to switch to you. Both times, competitor names were mentioned, but the reasons are very different.

Improved PCI Compliance Adherence

One of my biggest pet peeves as a former contact centre manager is agents not pausing the recording or – even worse – physically writing down customers’ credit card numbers or other personal information.

That is just wild! Hello, PCI compliance. You and I both know that that is not only negligent but is reckless behaviour that needs to stop right now.

While contact centre AI can not (yet) stop your agents from physically writing down personal details (only you can, sorry!), it can eliminate the problem of not pausing.

Generative AI-based auto redaction tools will use their contextual understanding to not only detect sensitive information but also redact it from the transcript and the audio file so you can drastically improve your PCI compliance adherence.

Drastically Shorten Call Handling Times

After-call work, like manually writing call summaries, hugely impacts your handling times. Most agents take anywhere from 2-5 minutes to summarize the call contents and the next steps. Again, Generative AI in the form of Auto Call Summaries comes to the rescue.

Because Gen AI has contextual understanding, it can automatically and accurately summarize your call (including the next steps if they were discussed during the call), and generate a summary automatically.

Discover Missed Revenue Or Loyalty Program Opportunities

Agents often miss opportunities to up-sell, cross-sell, or position the loyalty program due to the lack of training or missed cues in the conversation.

For example, the agent could offer room upgrades, dining packages, or spa treatments while taking a new reservation.

These up-and-cross-sell opportunities can lead to a much better customer experience (as the guest might not have been aware of these options) and, of course, they can help increase the revenue generated by a single guest.

In addition, the agents could use this opportunity to promote loyalty programs effectively or explain their benefits to guests.

Contact centre AI can help identify those missed opportunities by flagging the call as a potential up- or cross-sell candidate or identifying conversations that did not cover the loyalty program. Your agents can then follow up with these guests and offer them an upgrade or additional services.

Gain More Insight Into Common Guest Concerns Or Complaints

Do you clearly understand what your guests are most worried or concerned about? Do you know what they complain about after they leave?

By using Generative AI, you can automatically evaluate all calls to discover your guests’ fears, worries, and concerns, as well as their complaints, and proactively address them.

For example, customers might be worried about how to get to the hotel late at night. Maybe you offer a shuttle bus, or a taxi service is always available. You can add this information to your website and train your agents to mention this as they take new reservations.

Additionally, this allows you to keep track of recurring guest issues, such as frequent complaints about booking systems, room amenities, or staff behaviour.

By identifying these, you can improve your booking system, upgrade your room amenities, and train your staff to provide a better customer experience.

Conclusion

Generative AI-based contact centre solutions can drastically impact your contact centre performance, whether that is by automating your QA processes, shortening call handling times, or improving PCI compliance.

They can also help you increase revenue and profitability by flagging calls where competitor names are mentioned, identifying missed revenue opportunities, and giving you more insight into your guests’ concerns or complaints.

This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of MiaRec – View the Original Article

For more information about MiaRec - visit the MiaRec Website

Call Centre Helper is not responsible for the content of these guest blog posts. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of Call Centre Helper.

Author: MiaRec
Reviewed by: Megan Jones