Why Your Tourism And Hospitality Company Needs Service Desk Software
Traveling to new destinations offers unparalleled joy and is a fantastic way to experience the world. People today are particularly interested in experiencing new things in their lives, especially when traveling. That is why in the tourism and hospitality sector, it is not uncommon to see travelers spending more on unique moments that elevate their journeys.
A McKinsey report predicts that the tourism and hospitality industry will grow on average at 5.8% per year between 2022 and 2032. Sure enough, the future of this industry is exciting and holds great promise for both travelers and industry players.
So, what does a person need while traveling? Travel itinerary, flight tickets, and hotel reservations, right? Not quite. Tourism and hospitality sector is an incredibly competitive industry with complex functions that do more than simply help customers plan itineraries, book tickets, and make hotel reservations.
Tourism companies and hotel businesses perform a wide variety of customer service functions that make their travel experiences worthwhile. In this blog, we examine how AI-powered service desk software with intuitive automation capabilities helps support teams turn tourist troubles into triumphs.
The tourism and hospitality industry's CX imperative
Tourism companies and hotel businesses are service-based, meaning a large part of a business's success depends on the quality of customer service and the overall brand experience it offers. This includes the quality and usefulness of services, the friendliness and customer-centricity of support agents, and the timeliness of providing resolutions.
Passengers and guests may seek assistance with issues such as rescheduling itineraries, dealing with cancellations, processing refunds, dealing with accidents or losing valuable documents, tracking misplaced or lost luggage, disputing tariffs, identifying discrepancies in bills, and demanding waivers. Whatever the problem, support representatives in the travel, tourism, and hospitality industries are duty-bound to ensure that every customer's experience is fantastic.
Offering the best service experience requires tourism companies to enhance their responsiveness to customers and communicate seamlessly with them. By proactively anticipating travelers' needs and understanding their desires, tourism and hospitality companies try to meet visitors’ expectations by providing satisfactory resolutions to their requests and ultimately build brand loyalty.
AI-powered helpdesk software spanning internal teams and customer channels can help organizations better collaborate, integrate customer data, improve real-time CX, and gain a competitive advantage. You can gain an in-depth idea from this blog: 10 Innovative Uses Of AI In Customer Support And Communication
Common pain points in the tourism and hospitality industry
While the tourism and hospitality industry is often seen as abundant with resources, it faces numerous challenges that can impact guest satisfaction and business operations. Let us learn more about these pain points and ways of solving them in detail.
- Lengthy service response times: Despite technological advancements, long waiting and hold times to reach customer support are lingering pain points for travel companies worldwide. Spending a long time talking to a support agent can test the patience of even the most patient and understanding customer. Most times, customers end up getting frustrated and abandon attempts to seek support. Reducing customer service response times begins when your service desk software's AI segregates incoming cases/tickets accurately and automatically. AI-powered case management features help support teams prioritize and resolve tourist issues faster.
You are also likely to start engaging with your guests without making them wait for a longer duration. The AI performs tedious tasks like going through all customer communication across multiple channels so that support teams can breathe easy. Fast service can also be achieved with the help of self-service portals. Self-service is an approach where customers access resources to find solutions independently without requiring assistance from a service representative. A well-structured knowledge base further enhances these portals by providing comprehensive information that users can easily navigate. Self-service portals give passengers and guests an efficient way of getting answers to various questions and issues incredibly fast. - Inability to comprehend customer moods, intents, sentiments, and their level of satisfaction: Understanding travelers is not easy. If customer support teams fail to comprehend customer moods, intents, and sentiments accurately, it can lead to several negative consequences, such as escalated interactions, providing incorrect or irrelevant solutions, prolonging the resolution process, and further annoying guests. Shockingly enough, despite the availability of tools that help brands understand consumers better, the issue persists and has become a pain point.
AI-driven features help brands reimagine visitor journeys with modern AI-assisted channels. Intent recognition and sentiment analysis with AI in your service desk software help support representatives decipher guest messages accurately. With AI-powered tools, you can listen to your customers' voices, recognize their intent, and analyze sentiments. Survey tools play a crucial role in helping companies understand their customers by gathering valuable feedback from guests. This feedback drives improvements across the visitor's journey and measures their satisfaction levels.
In the tourism and hospitality industry, tools like C-Sat and NPS scores are particularly effective for capturing and analyzing customer sentiment. AI-powered predictive analytics takes this a step further by using machine learning algorithms to analyze historical data and predict future trends, behaviors, and outcomes. These models leverage vast datasets to uncover patterns and relationships, providing businesses with deeper insights for strategic decision-making. An omnichannel service desk streamlines communication and improves your support center’s case resolution pace. It boosts enterprise efficiency and customer satisfaction in tourism and hospitality with 24/7 care and seamless support. - Hindrance communicating with customers across multiple channels: If a traveler’s queries or complaints are not addressed promptly or effectively on one or multiple channels, they may abandon the interaction and seek assistance elsewhere. Missing out on customer communication is a significant pain point and can result in losing a customer permanently. In today’s customer-centric business environment, where seamless customer interactions across multiple channels are essential for building loyalty and driving growth, omnichannel service desk software becomes a valuable asset for customer care.
Omnichannel helpdesk software centralizes communication between channels—from traditional voice support to digital interactions across email, chat, and social media. Tourism and hospitality businesses can thus support and enhance guest satisfaction and optimize service workflows. - Automated service workflow: Without automation, serving travelers and guests would likely be slower, less efficient, and potentially less effective. Agents would lose valuable time doing everything manually. Heavy workloads and mundane, repetitive tasks will weigh down their morale. Ultimately, the stress will lead to incorrect information sharing and mistakes during case resolution. The tourism and hospitality industry can use AI and automation technology to resolve existing pain points and set the stage for a sustainable future.
Automation helps service teams provide the highest quality of support to guests. Automation and digitization can also free up staff from attending to repetitive functions that could be handled more efficiently via an app and instead reserve the human touch for roles where staff can add the most value. The system can handle routine inquiries instantly and repetitive tasks around the clock. This immediate support builds trust and reduces client frustration. - Inconsistent support across time zones, language barriers, and 24/7 availability: If customers are not provided with quality support around the clock from multiple locations, chances are they will leave your brand for another brand that actually provides those features. Despite digitalization and the availability of necessary technology, inconsistent service plagues the contact centers of many tourism and hotel brands. Cloud-based helpdesk makes geographical distances redundant and brings teams from across the world on common ground, facilitating communication and productivity wherever they are to achieve a common goal of providing travelers with top-quality service and support.
Remote collaboration not only helps teams work together but also enables brands to provide round-the-clock service and support to their valuable guests who may be located in different time zones and far-flung locales. Customer service teams would also face several challenges, such as difficulty communicating with customers across geographical distances, non-native speakers who communicate in different languages, and international tourists. Language barriers could hinder knowledge sharing and lead to misunderstandings and decreased visitor satisfaction.
AI-powered translation functionality goes beyond literal translations to ensure effective and accurate conversational support for your valuable customers. It gives your customer care team the power to fulfill customer requests from vast demographics. Additionally, AI-powered speech transcription with AI, ML, and automatic speech recognition (ASR) captures the context of messages to provide a detailed and accurate record of guest interactions with your tourism company or hotel business. - Third-party software integration: If a customer service team does not have access to third-party software integration features in their helpdesk software, they may face several challenges, such as working in siloed systems isolated from other departments within the same organization. Siloed data will make it difficult to get a complete view of visitor interactions and history. Lack of information and data sharing eventually leads to reduced productivity of business teams, increased customer wait times, and case resolutions that are prone to errors, cause frustration, and result in poor guest experience. Integrating business applications with ThinkOwl helps enterprises better manage users and boost team performance.
Application programming interfaces (APIs) connect third-party software systems to enable communication and data exchange. APIs define the methods and protocols for interaction between software and ensure that data is in the correct format for both systems to understand each other. ThinkOwl makes third-party software integrations hassle-free. The software effortlessly integrates all your apps, giving you a unified view of your tech stack and streamlining operations.
In the realm of customer support, service desk software with AI and intuitive automation is a powerful solution that empowers tourism companies and hotel businesses to navigate the ever-evolving customer service landscape with a forward-thinking approach, ensuring continuous customer satisfaction.
At a time when delighting customers can feel tricky, especially with limited resources, how can your social media strategy improve the quality of customer support? Discover in this blog: Digital Revolution: How Social Media Is Reshaping Customer Service
Complement concierges with Conversational AI
At a time when user engagement is becoming more complicated, delighting customers can feel tricky, especially with limited resources. How can tourism companies and hotel businesses ensure the best quality of service and support for customers?
Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing how industries function, providing new and innovative ways to address pain points, resolve customer issues, and personalize interactions. AI technologies, together with intuitive automation, help brands in travel, tourism, and hospitality personalize their offerings and are instrumental in earning customer loyalty.
Brands in service-based industries like tourism and hospitality avoid CX breakdowns by leveraging AI to enhance personalization and customer-centricity at every step of their brand journey. As technology evolves and refines, brands lean on AI tools to automate routine tasks, such as case assignment and data extraction, aiming to improve efficiency and accuracy. It supports human-machine collaboration, providing agents with suggestions for responses and relevant case information.
With ThinkOwl, you can recognize where problems arise in the customer journey and react immediately with appropriate measures. Meet client expectations, ensure there is value in what you have to offer, and amaze your customers with stellar CX. This informative article will help you create the best customer journeys: Customer Journey Mapping Is The Way To Your Customer’s Heart
How do ThinkOwl’s AI-powered solutions elevate CX in the tourism and hospitality industry?
Customer service teams are lifelines of the tourism and hospitality industry and are instrumental in ensuring their success. However, entrusting the full responsibility of your customer care to concierges or being overly dependent on your front desk can drastically affect the quality of your service and support. That’s why businesses committed to enhancing customer experiences and building lasting relationships trust ThinkOwl.
ThinkOwl is a powerful, easy-to-use cloud platform for modern tourism companies and hotel businesses. It uses artificial intelligence to automate customer support and communication processes, boosting efficiency. OwlDesk and OwlForce by ThinkOwl strike a fine balance between human expertise and technical prowess to provide unmatched experiences that drive customer satisfaction and loyalty.
OwlDesk is a cloud-based service desk that supports service teams with AI. It features an omnichannel inbox, AI-supported processes, automated workflows, seamless communication, and self-service. The software’s AI-driven case management module efficiently organizes tickets and streamlines service workflows, as well as distributes workloads based on agents' availability and experience. OwlDesk can be integrated with third-party enterprise applications to serve as a centralized information hub providing real-time data.
However, the full might of ThinkOwl's AI is unlocked when you combine OwlDesk with OwlForce. OwlForce integrates advanced AI features to efficiently automate tourism and hospitality business processes and enhance their customers' service experience. The solution automates processes with conversational AI, enabling fully automated handling of guest dialogues across various channels. It includes features such as multilingual conversational AI, robotic process automation (RPA), intelligent data extraction, and AI assistance for customer service teams.
The mighty Owl has your support teams' back. Try ThinkOwl now.
