TOPICS: Chatbot for Travel    Building a chatbot   

Hotel Chatbot – 4 Tips for Building Your First Hotel Chatbot

"I want a hotel chatbot for my website, where do I start?"

Getting traffic, driving bookings, and making sure your guests keep coming back – there are many fronts to monitor when you’re in the hotel business. At present, the demands of the mobile-oriented audience is one of the key areas of focus for the hospitality industry. Leading hotels around the world are building chatbots on their websites, so they can offer millennial travelers with instant, on-demand support. If you’re thinking of creating a hotel chatbot for your own business, here are a few quick pointers.

1. Choose the right chatbot platform.

You’ll have no dearth of options when it comes to chatbot platforms. But choosing the right one is your first crucial step towards effective hotel chatbot development. Pick the platform that offers you the maximum number of tools and features. This way, you’ll be able to optimize your chatbot with all the functionalities you’d like it to have. Also pay attention to how user-friendly the chatbot platform is, because that will affect how easily you’re able to use the tools and features it offers.

2. Set a goal for your chatbot.

What do you want to achieve by building a hotel chatbot? The answer will be specific to your hotel business and what it needs at the moment. Are you looking to improve your customer service standards? Is your website not generating enough leads? Or are you looking to convert more visitors into paying customers? In each case, your approach to hotel chatbot development will need to be different. You will need to create a chatbot with the right script and actions based on the goals you set for it.

3. Don’t just create a chatbot because everyone else is.

Don't build a chatbot just for the sake of building a chatbot. A lot of hotel owners make the mistake of building chatbots without putting enough thought to why they need one. And they can’t be blamed – chatbots are trending and hotel owners feel may like they’ll be left behind if their website doesn’t have one. But it’s important to remember that building hotel chatbots that don’t address your customers’ needs will bring you no value and can even have a negative impact on your numbers.

Sure, you can refer to good chatbot examples in your industry, and study what the best chatbots do to boost customer engagement and sales. But also allocate at least as much time to mapping out the areas where your website falls short of your customers’ expectations, and see to it that your hotel chatbot addresses them.

4. Hire an expert.

There is absolutely no harm in hiring a professional to create your hotel chatbot for you. If anything, doing this can save you considerable amounts of time, effort, and resources. Chatbot development is a specialized skill that needs training and experience. Hiring a chatbot expert lets you take advantage of this training and experience, and gets you an error-free, customized chatbot in no time. It’s a lot like how you hire an SEO expert to analyze your website and get it a better rank on Google. You can do it yourself, sure, but can you afford to devote the amount of time it’ll take for you to familiarize yourself with the nuances?

We help hotels and other businesses with their chatbot development needs. To know more about how to create a chatbot for your own website, feel free to reach out to us.