How Travel Chatbots Are Improving Customer Experience?

How Travel Chatbots Are Improving Customer Experience?

2020, Jul 31    

Travel chat bots can be used to create an unprecedented level of growth in the dynamic customer-centric travel and tourism industry.

The advancement of technology has certainly made travelling much easier. From booking flights to finding a place to stay to even using maps to navigate our way, we can do it all with the help of our smartphone and internet.

The travel industry in itself is dynamic, and to keep that dynamism alive its customer service has to be top-notch. The industry depends a lot on its customer services, customer experience, and feedback. The best way to enhance this customer experience is by using Travel Bots.

What Are Travel Bots?

Chat bots are the newest means of communicating with customers. Through the use of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning, these smart bots can be taught to communicate with people effectively.

Industries like Airlines, Food services, Real estate, and health care use these AI bots all the time to offer their customers a resourceful and interactive service. It not only makes things easier for the customer but also greatly benefits the company that uses it.

It provides a 24/7 service so the company does not have to worry about missing important queries. The chat bots can handle the repetitive questions, and the dedicated customer service staff can focus on more serious issues.

Bots can combine all that and deliver a better customer experience that makes travelling more fun, easy, and convenient.

And these friendly bots used in the travel industry are also referred to as travel bots.

5 Ways Travel Bots Are Improving Customer Experience

Chat bots are shaping our travel industry as we know it. Although it still has a long way to go till it can completely replace humans, these AI bots are still doing a great job in bringing in customer satisfaction. 

Here is how they do it:

  1. Travel Bots Can Simplify The User Experience

    Customers usually tend to visit a lot of websites before selecting one particular offer or package. A study by Expedia states a customer visits up to 38 different travel websites before fixing upon one. Now, this is a long and hefty process.

    This happens for a lot of different reasons. Some cannot find important information immediately, some cannot find sufficient information, and some just don’t like the design.

    But whatever the case, a website with travel bots can help directly communicate and engage with that particular customer as soon as he/she arrives on that website. The travel bots can provide all the necessary information so that they don’t have to go looking for it on seven other websites.

    By decreasing this hassle, companies can even make recurring customers and make their website grow even more.

  2. Make Instant Recommendations

    Travel agencies or agents will first take your information and make a prospect. Based on that prospect they will provide you with information about places you can visit and hotels you can stay in.

    But this takes a lot of time, and sometimes the workload increases even more while comparing prices to get the customer the best value. Travel bots can be the ultimate solution to significantly reducing this workload. Bots can be programmed to first take information from the customer.

    Through human-like conversations, the bots can inquire about budget, preference about the place and travel, and then create a prospect that can be used to calculate and show the customer the available options almost instantly.

    The bot can display all the relevant information regarding hotels, cruises, car rental options, and travel insurance, so it is easier for the customer to check and compare in a significantly less time-consuming way.

  3. Manage Booking & Payments

    Chat bots can do more than just show and tell. They are even capable of making and completing deals. Sales funnels can be implemented in these bots through which customers will be guided smoothly to confirm a purchase or make a deal.

    Specialized booking bots can be used to communicate with the customer in various ways including email, SMS, or text messages and complete important bookings like car rentals, hotel rooms, airline tickets, and many more.

    Communicating with chat bots is also very easy. You don’t have to sign up to anything, open a separate account, or even download a buggy app only to be bombarded with ads. 

    All you have to do is answer questions, and after the payment, you can even allow your information to be saved so the next time you come you don’t have to redo the previous steps since the bot will recognize you from the previously saved information.

  4. Provide Helpful & Informative Tips

    There are many ways you can implement bots for the customer’s benefit. One creative way of doing it will be to allow the bots to help out potential travellers by giving out useful tips and information.

    For example, travel bloggers can help the travelling community grow even bigger with the help of AI bots. 

    Suppose you are a travel blogger and have travelled up to 5 different countries. You have all the necessary information, amazing tips, and tricks about travelling to those destinations. You can reach out to travel agencies and ask them to use your videos as guidelines for potential travellers.

    Now, if someone asks the chat bot for tips about a particular place and if that place happens to be on your video then the bot will pull up all your relevant videos and show it to the customers.

    This takes customer service and customer satisfaction to a whole new different level and can create a better travel community who are eager to help others out.

  5. Solve Baggage Claims and Tracking

    We have all been to someplace where we had to wait for hours to get our luggage. Things get even worse if the luggage gets damaged, broken or worse LOST!

    In that case, we then go to the customer service centre to file a complaint or report. Then you have to communicate with them, fill up paper works, and wait for further notice. This whole process is tedious and filled with paperwork, wait-times, and most importantly, frustration.

    Smart bots can be used for the benefit of both parties. Just like handling queries, integrated AI bots can be allowed to handle baggage claims and tracking to ease up the workload of the customer service staff. 

    Bots can use a variety of ways to communicate with the customer and keep them updated about the entire process and give them the estimated date, time, and location of their baggage arrival.

    This has not been implemented yet on a global scale and is still in development, but we can hope to use it very soon.

  6. Easier Upgrades

    Upgrading to business class on your way or having the ability to shift to better rooms is all part of the whole travelling experience. Loyal customers are able to receive these benefits form airlines, hotels, and travel agencies and they receive them based on loyalty points.

    To make it easier for customers as well as the companies to keep track of their loyalty points, AI bots can be used. You can redeem your benefits simply by confirming it to the bot while making your bookings. This makes redeeming and managing loyalty or membership points easier and greatly reduces wait times on the customer service part.

  7. Better Employee Schedules

    Like we mentioned previously that chat bots provide benefits for the company as well. One such benefit is proper employee scheduling. It is important to have the right person at the right time.

    In the travel industry, many employees work in shifts, and having the right employee in the right shift can increase efficiency, performance, and overall customer experience. Since a lot of these employees are always on the move and manage different shifts, AI bots can be used to instantly update, notify and redirect their time, schedule, and location changes.

Overview

The travel industry is changing as we know it. Travelling is easier than it was ever before and that is exactly how it should be. With the help of Chat bots the industry is flourishing even more due to the positive customer experience. Bots are being developed every day to make the customer experience even better so we can enjoy our travels more and worry less.