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In the last ten years, no other technology has fundamentally changed customer communication as much as Conversational AI. This umbrella term refers to AI-supported automatic dialogue systems. Whether referred to as conversational agents, conversational assistants, or simply chatbots, these virtual helpers have established themselves as a fixed entity. When they are voice-controlled, they are called voice assistants. Although the first chatbot was created in the 1960s, interest in dialogue-based user interfaces saw a renaissance due to advances in AI technology, particularly following the release of ChatGPT in November 2022.
The increasing computing power this century has led to significant developments in the field of artificial intelligence, which has infiltrated our daily lives in various ways. For the first time, humans are living with artificial intelligences. They are in our smartphones, understand our language, assess our health for insurance purposes, assemble our cars, or trade with our money. Most artificial intelligences are specialists; they can do one particular thing very well. Yet, the development of artificial intelligence is advancing faster than ever before. Experts talk about a paradigm shift, the next evolutionary stage of AI, which we reached in 2022. AI has become generative; it can create things like text, computer code, art, music, video, and even a lot of controversies. The technology behind these tools are neural networks that recognize patterns in huge data sets and derive predictions from them. In the case of language and text-based applications like ChatGPT, these are Large Language Models (LLM), which analyze and generate text. And these models are getting bigger and more complex.
The interaction with chatbots based on LLMs is amazingly smooth and natural. These models have the ability to understand and generate natural language in far more complex ways. The chatbot can practically understand any question, remembers what has been written, and composes the answers based on the hotel information it has received. Thus, chatbots are becoming increasingly valuable digital employees, who can relieve the hotel team in guest communication. Due to the functioning of ChatGPT, which finds statistical patterns in text rather than connecting words with their meanings, it can fabricate facts and figures, misunderstand questions, and carry biases found in its training data. For these reasons, it is currently not feasible to use ChatGPT directly as a hotel chatbot that answers guests' questions about bookings, the hotel, or travel planning. In customer service, it is essential that the responses are correct and consistent. However, Large Language Models are a basic technology on which chatbots and voice assistants can be built. Thus, DialogShift is developing a new generation of hotel chatbots that combine two capabilities: the natural interaction ability, generative and holistic nature of Large Language Models, and the ability to provide consistent and hotel-specific answers. Several language models from OpenAI are used in combination to ensure the chatbot communicates the information reliably and that its tone of voice matches the hotel and the brand. The chatbot naturally writes the answers itself.
"Automation is not there to replace personal service, but to support it."
It is clear that a chatbot cannot answer all inquiries. However, it can still significantly relieve the hotel team by taking over more than 90% (!) of them. These include the frequently asked questions about parking, restaurant opening hours, room bookings, table reservations, wellness treatments, and of course, booking inquiries. Especially for booking-related questions, the immediate response has a very positive effect on the conversion rate. Long waiting times have the opposite effect and lead to more abandoned bookings. If the guest receives the information they need immediately to make a booking decision, the likelihood of a booking is much higher. Hotel chatbots autonomously answer up to 10,000 questions per month - depending on the size and complexity of the hotel. This saves the hotel team, who would otherwise have to take calls or answer emails, a lot of time. Time that employees can usefully spend elsewhere. One of the main advantages of a hotel chatbot is the ability to respond to multiple guests on multiple channels in multiple languages simultaneously. A chatbot does not take breaks, works around the clock, and can communicate in several languages and on multiple channels simultaneously. Since many businesses find it difficult to find sufficient staff, such relief is timely and allows employees to focus on other important tasks. Automation is not there to replace personal service, but to support it. Automation relieves employees and creates time for the more valuable activities in service. To ensure that employees have time to pay attention to guests, take time for them and their wishes, they should be relieved of simple and recurring tasks.
Chatbots are available around the clock, can handle a very high volume of communication simultaneously, and they respond immediately. Applications where the chatbot forwards inquiries to human employees in the live chat when it cannot help further are called hybrid. A chatbot is ideally suited to answer frequent standard inquiries and to handle predefined use cases. Its advantage: It is available for guests around the clock. Its limits: It cannot answer all questions, especially individual and complex concerns must be passed on to the hotel team. The live chat, on the other hand, is perfectly suited when it comes to personally and individually advising guests and discussing more complex topics directly with human employees. Relevant disadvantage from the customer's perspective: The live chat is usually only active during office hours, and there can be waiting times if all responsible employees are occupied. By combining chatbot and live chat, the advantages can be maximized and disadvantages mitigated. Valuable synergy effects and benefits arise for both guests and employees. These can focus on more demanding customer concerns due to the relief from standard concerns by the virtual colleague, so that human resources can be used profitably.
▶ Through the chatbot, a large part of the preliminary work can be automated.
▶ The chatbot forwards, if it cannot help itself, not to any employee, but to the right department, for example, to the reservation center if the inquiry refers to a booking.
▶ Guests do not have to repeat their concern, as all relevant information from the previous chatbot dialog is passed directly to the live chat. The team knows immediately and can advise the guest seamlessly.
▶ If the chatbot dialog takes place outside of office hours and it cannot be transferred live to employees, the chatbot can ask for the guest's email address, so they are notified as soon as someone responds in the live chat. This way, the guest is brought back into the chat at a later time when an employee is available.
