Reducing front desk calls is on the mind of most hoteliers, especially now.
High season is right around the corner, and the volumes of inbound tourists are getting back to pre-pandemic numbers, but the staffing levels remain low.
The situation now is not ideal and your team can’t just pick whose queries are more important and forget the rest. Neither can you ignore and stop answering your guests whatsoever.
Your goal as a hospitality leader is to always exceed guests’ expectations, and when your front desk staff is overwhelmed with inquiries, your service quality will be compromised. Plus, your hotel becomes vulnerable to negative feedback; not to mention the stress your employees are going through.
Taming this problem at your hotel will reward you with happier employees, prevent burnout, and allow your teams to focus on what matters: providing high-value services.
Here is what you can do to minimize the front desk calls with limited resources, while operating at full capacity:
A common reason why guests call the front desk is to request room service, purchase upgrades, or additional amenities. Every attempt when the guests want to go ahead with the room service order or book a table for your tea time but they can’t get through means extra revenue slipping through your fingers.
Having a solution that allows your guests to make purchases on their own will reduce the number of calls, and bring you more ancillary revenue opportunities. Smart assistants, tablets, mobile apps, and IPTV solutions offer different levels of room service automation when the guests are in their rooms.
Make sure you choose a solution that also lets your team receive, organize and dispatch these room service tasks to the respective departments so that they can overlook the services in real-time and move more efficiently.
If something goes wrong or doesn’t work, it’s frustrating for the guests, especially if they’re left waiting on the line and can’t voice out their problems.
Your guests should be able to efficiently communicate with the hotel staff without the need to call the front desk. Implementing clear feedback channels with digital formulas that the guests can send out, and having a centralized place for managing feedback, including complaints is an essential step to avoiding unnecessary front desk calls. Moreover, centralizing guest feedback in one platform will give you a clear idea of what works and what can be improved to boost guest satisfaction.
All in all, when there is something on their mind, your guests want to be heard so it’s important that their comments and queries get through every time.
Whether it’s pre-stay or during their stay, guests tend to call the front desk to ask questions about hotel facilities, amenities, holiday tips, or transportation.
If this happens a lot, it implies that the information can be contained and delivered in a way for the guests to find it easily, so that they don’t even think about calling the front desk. This is a great opportunity for you to integrate all your FAQs and travel information in one place through chatbots, hotel Apps, or digital signage (tablets or IPTC) and say goodbye to the print work.
And if you want to benefit from automating hotel FAQ further, look for a solution that is paired with AI technology. This way you’ll be able to collect user preferences and target your offerings to your guests’ likings, to create that personalized experience.
As a hotelier, your objective should be to ensure the smoothest booking process possible.
Make sure your online booking system is easy-to-use, and delivers clear information about reservation changes, and cancellations, in the form of automated email drips so that you don’t give your guests more reasons to call your front desk.
Even the slightest trouble with placing payments can make or break the customer’s decision to buy the room. You will want to make this part of the booking process extra smooth, which means having very clear instructions, plus extending the usual credit card and cash payments to digital options like Google Wallet, Apple Pay, or Samsung Pay. This strategy can also be used to drive more direct bookings for example by offering mobile payments exclusively for bookings made on your website.
Check-in automation is no longer a thing of tomorrow, it is today’s industry standard. Self-check-in liberates your guests from queuing in the lobby and gives them a sense of independence while speeding up your front desk operations.
You can automate check-in with self-check-in kiosks, or go one step further and offer mobile check-in with digital room keys, meaning your guests can go straight to their rooms without having to stop at the front desk.
Through mobile check-in, the guests’ personal information automatically syncs into your main system, including their additional purchases or upgrades. You will remove stressful tasks like billing from your front desk operations and allow your teams to get more done.
Fully integrated internal systems are the holy grail of smooth hotel operations. As an industry leader, you will want to build your hotel’s tech toolstack with a forward-thinking mindset and choose flexible solutions that sync with your existing systems and processes.
Building up towards complete integration of your systems will step-by-step offload your staff by automating menial tasks, minimizing service handling time and costs, and smoothening communication between departments.
The benefits of this strategy go far beyond just reducing front desk calls. It leads to overall employee satisfaction and the smoothest workflows, so you’ll make room for providing warm, personalized services where your team’s hospitality shines the brightest.
AVA allows guests to order room service without the need to call the front desk. Your staff receive tasks and dispatch jobs to respective departments through AVA Task Management System. AVA also integrates with your team’s favorite messaging app (Telegram, WhatsApp, LINE, and more!) so that your field staff can manage tasks on the go.
Through voice commands, guests can ask questions, leave messages, and feedback directly to AVA. All the queries are then fed into the AVA’s Task Management Platform or your hotel’s existing software. This creates a database that is centralizing all the queries from the guests so that your team can handle them one by one. Plus, AVA uses AI to analyze and fuel your business efforts with data about guest behavior.
AVA combines touch-based digital signage with voice assistant, which means that the hoteliers upload their unique information on the device, and the guests can then explore hotel facilities, ask for nearby tourist tips, or even make reservations for restaurants and places they want to visit. All queries go straight to your CRM system so that you can know your guests on a deeper level.
AVA works like an in-room phone for the guests to connect with the hotel staff. The guests can dial the front desk through AVA, and your staff receives the call at the counter or on their phones. This allows them to pick up the calls even when they are on the move.
And if you want to take it one step further, you can record and extract data from all your calls with our new call intelligence system, Vocol.
Reducing front desk calls is crucial for hotel teams in order to maintain exceptional service quality. By streamlining task management, room service delivery, and feedback channels, as well as automating FAQ, booking processes, check-in/check-out, and synchronizing your tools, you’ll be able to minimize front desk calls and boost employee satisfaction.
This means happier, more productive staff and better service quality, both of which contribute to your hotel’s success.
With Aiello Voice Assistant (AVA) our hotel partners like InterContinental Kaohsiung were able to significantly reduce front desk calls and automate room service tasks while keeping the costs low. Learn more about how our technology can help your hotel thrive and schedule a demo with our team today.
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