Nowadays, with the rapid growth in the new era of Internet Technology, almost everyone starts planning their vacation by looking up information on the Web. Gone are the days when people made their choice relying on word-of-mouth referrals, images in hotel brochures, or conventional travel agents’ recommendations.
Today researching travel options and booking online is a conventional method of choosing the best fit for your holiday or a business trip.
And there’s no wonder that many travelers form opinions of a hotel before having set afoot at it, just through what they experience online. That’s why providing a superior experience to your website visitors is nowadays so important. How easy is it to make an online hotel reservation?
How long prospects have to wait for reservation confirmation or answers to their questions? Are your support agents equipped with the right tools?
Why Don’t We Chat?
Implementing a Live Chat solution on a hotel’s website can help to meet these challenges by establishing instant interaction between clients and hotel representatives. Live Chat is less expensive compared to call center service and rich with multiple advanced features that can improve hotel online customer service.
Whether it’s a customer that needs to make last-minute changes in their arrangements, or an occasional online visitor that needs to make a reservation immediately, hotel support agents will be ready to tackle any questions, concerns, and issues quickly and efficiently.
Things like these will improve customer satisfaction rate, and also might help to earn more loyal, repeat clients.
Achieve a Better Online Customer Experience
Does this sound like a good idea for your business? Live Chat software provides you with plenty of useful features to differentiate yourself from self-service online solutions and instead give consumers highly personalized service, recommendations, and advice right from your very first interaction with them.
The majority of Live Chat systems provide you with the option to take a look at visitors’ details to better understand what they are looking for even before they ask their questions or request a quote. With the Real-Time Visitor Monitoring feature, you can find out which keywords they used to get to your website and which pages they have browsed before contacting you.
Also, you can give your online support warm personalized touch by using real names and photos of your customer support staff in Live Chat. The impression of friendliness and warmth will make your site visitors feel as though they are sitting across the desk from you while you are sifting through the information to locate options that are best suited to their budget and taste.
The Key to Efficient Staff Multitasking
Live Chat software is a great way to make sure that your resources are used effectively. Unlike phone support, a single representative can easily chat with multiple site visitors at the same.
Besides, it allows overcoming such problems as bad accents and hard-to-pronounce names of foreign guests. While some overseas tourists might be hesitant to make a phone call in English, the Live Chat solution would better suit them as there is less chance of misunderstanding.
Also, hotel agents can use a rich set of features available with most of the Live Chat providers to accelerate online communications and make a great professional impression. To name a few, they can transfer files such as brochures, hotel accommodation images, and maps during a chat session; send links instead of explaining and describing the details; use pre-written “canned” responses to give instant answers to common questions.
A Bridge to Bring Prospects to Your Hotel Website
Is your business going social? So are your prospects and customers. With the rise of social media travelers worldwide tend to turn to online reviews, forums, and social platforms when planning their holidays or business trips.
It becomes extremely important that companies do not miss the opportunity to convert those random visitors into customers by being able to engage them and provide customer service basically from any landing page the customer finds himself at, be it the company’s Facebook, Twitter, or Google+ page.
You can easily increase the number of channels through which prospective clients can reach you by adding a Live Chat link to your pages in social networks (Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, Google+). Most Live Chat providers offer special codes for each of them to let your followers contact you immediately any time they have questions about your services.
Extra tools that Live Chat providers offer to hotel websites:
- Co-browser to navigate visitors between different pages of your site and demonstrate various options.
- Geo-location map to see what part of the world the visitor is chatting from.
- Proactive Chat to engage more website visitors and send your best offers to them.
- Cross-domain support to make chat support available across all of your domains and sub-domains under a single license.
- Multiple departments to have the right people answer the customers’ questions.
- Chat transcripts to email important information that was shared in chat to the customer.
- Web-based operator console to allow the support agent to chat from any location and any computer without having to install the application.
Is your company taking advantage of this modern, cost-effective, and efficient tool to provide great online customer service?
We are in this together!
I need to let you all know that we are in on this together. If you need to vent, talk, cry, or just have some to talk with then I am here listening. Since I am working part-time at the local Kroger, I will to the best of my ability to work it out around my schedule. But you can reach me here:Email: hotelblogger@aremorch.com
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We will get through this unprecedented event together! #hotelstrong #hospitalitystrong
For any specific information on COVID-19, I recommend go to CDC, WHO, AHLA, AAHOA, and HSMAI. Also, follow information from your local authorities.
NOTE
We are starting to reopen some hotels again (Yay!!!). Make sure you follow their guidelines and say THANK YOU to those that now show a unique spirit to serve, and helps us all get through this!! #hotelstrong #hospitalitystrong
Guest Article
Julia Lewis
Julia is a Customer Service Advocate and Social Media Coordinator at Provide Support, LLC. She is a writer and blogger on customer experience, customer service innovation and live chat support service.
About Are Morch
Hi, I am Are Morch. Your Digital Marketing Coach and Customer Experience Expert specializes in creating effective digital customer experience offer for hotels while growing and scale customer acquisition and revenue.
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