Although there are SAAS based chatbots which can be utilized however custom chatbots are the perfect fit for a hospitality enterprise considering the following benefits:

A custom chatbot can enhance customer experience using AI.

Since the custom chatbots are not hosted on a solution provider’s server, the generated customer data including name, profile picture, email ID and contact number of the guests remain secured with hosting providers e.g.

A custom chatbot allows enterprises to upgrade the existing features or add more features such as intent, dialogue or entities depending upon the business requirement.

For example, you can feed your chatbot with thousands of conversational logs as per your need, that will be used by the bots to respond to each query in a personalized manner.

From the hotel’s website to social media channels such as Facebook, chatbots can be integrated anywhere, walking the visitors through the process of hotel bookings.

Enhanced Room Service

The AI-based chatbots can eliminate the need for hotel guests to interact with hotel staff, instead, establishing a virtual interaction through devices like mobiles. AI-driven bots will make it easy for the guests to perform tasks like ordering meals, getting suggestions for special dishes available in the hotel’s kitchen, regulating room temperature and lighting, receiving recommendations on sightseeing and visits etc. This way hotels can cut down on time, capital and human labor considerably.

Upselling Opportunities

A custom chatbot can easily cross-sell and upsell hotel services like spa, cafe or a bar. The chatbots can send hyper-personalized messages through push notifications or SMS, drawing insights on customer journey using their machine learning algorithms. They can use these insights to offer additional services to the guests depending upon their requirements.

Keeping in Touch Even after Check out

The custom chatbots can also engage with the guests even after they have checked out. Conducting personalized surveys to rate the customer’s hotel experience and sending them tailored discounts and offers via email marketing can essentially build customer loyalty and brand recall for the hotels.

Some of the popular chains of hotels that are using AI technologies include:

• Wynn Las Vegas integrating Amazon Echo to all their hotel rooms to allow the guests to access various hotel room features using voice command.
• Edwardian Hotels offering virtual hosts for enabling the guests to interact with the AI chatbot digitally and allowing self-service.
• Accor Hotels with their digital concierge named Mercure Bot that converses with the guests and helps them to know the local destinations better

AI-driven chatbot for hotels can essentially perform iterative tasks without roping in the hotel staff. While chatbot takes care of the monotonous requests, the hotel staff can engage in more productive tasks. Providing efficient guest communication and exceptional customer service, utilizing less time, capital, and human resources have made custom chatbot for enterprises the smartest revenue-generating technology for the hospitality industry.

For hotel enterprises that are serious about skyrocketing their sales, developing a custom chatbot can be a bit of a challenge. However, with customized chatbot solution, you can move one step closer to realizing the perfect hotel experience for your customers.

We at Affle Enterprise have developed chatbot for hotels, each built for a custom use case. Monitoring and witnessing the impact of their integration in real time.

For any queries regarding Mobile app development/Chatbot development, drop us a line @ [email protected].

Originally published at Affle Enterprise

Russia's disinformation campaign during the 2016 US presidential election rocked social media companies like Facebook and Twitter to its core.

The goal is not to launch a new flurry of hoaxes and chaos on social media for the 2020 US presidential election.

It's to teach the next generation of voters about how easily fraud erupts social media, and break down the tools foreign actors use to spread disinformation, Nico Sell, the co-founder of r00tz, said.

"They hear a lot about fake news out there -- these are things that we want to show them, the exact mechanics of how things really work."

This is the second year that the r00tz Asylum's challenge will be focused on politics, after kid hackers at Defcon 2018 learned how to hack into websites simulating state election results.

First, the Voting Village will be teaching kids how to hack simulated campaign finance websites and alter documents.

In the past few years, the focus of businesses has shifted from profit maximization to customer satisfaction, and rightly so. With the rise of social media platforms, modern-day consumers have gotten a voice, or rather, a concrete platform to voice their opinions. Here is How Technology Can Enhance Customer Experiences: A Travel Chatbot

And surely, no business would want their customers to put out their negative experience with brands on social media platforms for everyone to see!

According to the New Voice Media data, almost 59% of customers aged between 25-35 readily share their negative experiences online.

For any business – whether it be a for-profit or a non-profit enterprise, or whether it be a public or private enterprise – customer satisfaction is one among the many pivotal key performance indicators (KPIs) that have to be considered, monitored, and measured.

As such, the customer satisfaction quotient indicates how well a business is serving its customers. Improving this singular factor can change the face of a business.

After all, a happy customer is a satisfied customer. It is a proven fact that happy and satisfied customers not only become loyal and repeat customers of a brand, but they also bring in new customers.

And as is true of everything in the business world today, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) have found their way into the domain of customer satisfaction.

The most excellent example of this being chatbots. From enhancing the entire process of customer support to transforming the process of customer surveys, chatbots are finding applications in various fields of business.

However, in this post, we’re going to focus on travel chatbots and how they are transforming the travel industry for the better.

Travel Chatbot and its Benefits

Software Powered by AI and NLP, a chatbot is designed to simulate human speech and interact with humans in their natural languages. Chatbots can be developed and customized to suit the specific needs of a business. Since these bots are now the hottest trend in the industry, travel companies have also joined the game through Travel Bots.

Expedia maintains that while planning a trip, a traveler visits as many as 38 websites on an average. Not to forget the endless series of calls and interactions with travel agents and booking agencies.

All of this makes the process of planning a trip both time-consuming and overwhelming. This is where travel chatbot solutions come in.

Travel chatbots personal assistant bearing both analytical and predictive capabilities. Furthermore, they are available 24×7, can interact in a plethora of human languages and can respond to traveler queries and requests in real-time.

So, if you have a travel-related query, you can just ask a travel bot and the bot will answer your questions accurately, scourge the Internet to get you the best deals – basically, it will help you with anything you need.

A travel chatbot can help save a user’s time, help organize the trip, suggest places to visit, list the best deals available (travel tickets, accommodation, etc.), and much more.

Being excellent profiling tools, chatbots can help personalize the user experience by gathering relevant user data such as purchase history, travel preferences, etc and tell how Technology can enhance customer experiences: A Travel Chatbot

Travel Chatbots – Success Stories

Travel chatbots are already being leveraged by big names in the travel and hospitality industry such as Expedia, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Ryanair, and Marriott, to name a few.

For instance, Expedia’s Facebook Messenger bot allows users to perform a streamlined search for hotels. All one needs to do is to open Facebook Messenger and provide the bot details about the travel plan.

After the bot has all the necessary information, it will list the five most popular and top-rated hotels in the users’ preferred choice of location.

And once the users click on any one of the five options, they will be redirected to Expedia’s site where they can directly book the hotel.

Then again, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines’ travel bot can support 13 languages. It uses Facebook Messenger’s checkbox plugin feature on the checkout page to provide travelers with the option of choosing to receive all travel updates including booking confirmation, check-in notification, boarding pass, and flight status updates on Messenger itself.

Similarly, there’s another Facebook-based travel bot called Kayak that allows users to find the best hotel and flight deals via an instant messaging platform. Not just that, Kayak also offers beneficial travel advice to its users and updates them about their flight status.

Chatbot solutions help create a streamlined and smart communication channel between brands and users. Apart from this, they can automate the process of query/request handling, thereby allowing travel service providers to dedicate their human capital to other and more important tasks that need human interaction and effort.

Needless to mention, travel chatbots (just like any other chatbot) offer 24×7 customer support. So, customers no longer have to wait to get their travel issues and queries sorted.

This is just another example of how AI and chatbots are transforming the ways in which consumers are connecting and interacting with brands.

Thanks to AI, chatbot solutions are becoming increasingly smart and intelligent, so much so that they are becoming the trusted advisors of customers. And this is just the beginning, who knows what else chatbots will be able to do in the years to come!

Originally posted at Affle Enterprise.

Published by Shubham Sharma.

It may sound strange, but e-commerce and banking organizations almost work on the same principle. If they don’t get back to their customers soon enough, they’ll most likely lose the customer to the ever-increasing competitors. Thereby, it is important for both e-commerce and banking organizations to be available for their customers 24/7 at any cost.

As per a survey, about 44% of U.S. customers prefer chatbots over humans as customer support.

Chatbots have been around for only a few years and they’ve already gained enough popularity that more and more online businesses are using them to resolve the customers’ never-ending queries. Most of all, chatbots are cheaper and can save up to 30% cost on resolving customer requests per year.

1. Enhance User Experience

Let’s discuss an example: You’re an entrepreneur who spends most of his time traveling. You’re into some products an e-commerce store sells online but you have some queries. Would you wait for 3-5 business for the answers if you mail them? Definitely no!

At the same time, if you have an option to talk to a chatbot and ask about delivery duration, charges, product, and any other thing you’d want to know, you’re most likely to become a regular customer. That’s how chatbots are revolutionizing the user experience in e-commerce stores. For the same reason, the use of chatbots in banking has increased over the past few years.

2. Generating More Leads

Those days are long gone when cold calls or newsletters were enough to take your online business to its full potential – be it an e-commerce store or banking organization.

The advent of innovative chatbots has revolutionized the customer support phase – evolving your e-commerce or banking website into a less-frustrating platform. Whether you’re a finance manager or e-commerce manager, you’re always on the verge to stay one step ahead of the competitors. Thus, now is the right time to add a unique feature which can help in generating more leads.

3. Frequent Feedback Collection

The advancement in the natural language process and computing has given rise to the more generic chatbots which are able to handle more convincing conversations. In fact, AI integrated chatbots are able to handle dozens of customers’ queries that are redundant.

For example, if you get over a hundred questions about delivery charges or duration per month, you can simply program your chatbot to answer accordingly.

Moreover, if you’re looking to enhance your bank’s service and eliminate the downsides, the use of chatbots in enhancing the customer experience and asking for feedback at the end of the call has shown considerate outcomes for many banking organizations.

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"The advance of technology is based on making it fit in so that you don’t really even notice it, so it’s part of everyday life,” said Bill Gates while referring to the power of technology. This stands utterly accurate for advancements such as Artificial Intelligence enabled Chatbots, which foreshadow the future of technological advancements to come.

Artificial Intelligence, also referred to as Machine Intelligence, is an intricate innovation smoothly gearing up to revolutionize our lives forever. The stimulation of human intelligence using contemporary computers that imitates cognitive functions is changing the ways of problem-solving. And with cutting-edge disciplines such as AI and Chatbots, researchers are leading the way to a great transformation. Apart from all other ways of demonstrating an impact, the role of AI in healthcare industry is particularly ground-breaking.

Introduction of AI in Healthcare Industry

In recent times, the discussion has moved to a point where AI doctors replacing General Physicians in the future is not startling any more. Even though the switch may not happen in the near future, AI in the healthcare industry is definitely going to be assisting General Physicians to make an evolved diagnosis. There will soon be a time when the dependency on the human mind in the healthcare industry will decline from its current percentage. So, it is about time, we recognize and appreciate the benefits of AI Chatbots to the healthcare industry.

The super-responsive AI enabled Chatbots are presenting us with an option of a computerized medical professional with human-like conversational skills. It is not just revolutionary; it is a paradigm shift.

Originally published on Mobisoft Infotech

Chatbot technology has come a long way and more businesses are using it to be available to customers even when the business might be closed or when customers are looking for a quick interaction while they multitask.

From marketing to customer service, chatbots are having a significant impact on both B2B and B2C organizations in terms of both information gathering, lead generation, and elevated service. Here are some of the ways businesses can benefits when deploying chatbots into the system.

How businesses can benefit from deploying chatbots

1. Always on service

A chatbot is available even when a customer service rep is not. It allows for better and more timely communication with customers looking to ask a question, check on the status of an order, and other customer service issues.

2. Cost-effectiveness

For many businesses, deploying a chatbot is a less expensive solution that staffing a customer service center for extra hours. Even though a chatbot may not be able to answer questions or concerns for as many issues as a live person, it is a better option than no communication and for most businesses, a well-developed chatbot is able to answer many top concerns or frequently asked questions.

3. Analytics

When you have a chatbot running, you’re able to pull reporting from the program that offers insight into what kinds of questions customers are asking and where they are in their buyer’s journey. This helps businesses better address their trouble spots and also create more effective content marketing and outreach.

According to the website Ubuntupit, choosing the right framework to develop your bot is key. “Choosing a useful and powerful chatbot framework completes more than 50% of your work if you want to have your chatbot. Recent developments in machine learning and AI modules has brought significant changes in chatbot’s features…You have to train your bot and determine the architecture, its goal, and responsibilities, and the channel where it is going to be deployed…some of the best and innovative machine learning companies are solely devoted to developing the best chatbots based on artificial intelligence and machine learning.”

If your business is looking to get into chatbot development and create a chatbot for your business, you need the right chatbot framework to get started. Here are some open-source chatbot platforms and other chatbot development programs to look into.

Top chatbot framework for developers

1. IBM Watson

IBM Watson is a leading AI software that business developers are using to build bots for their brand. One use case is building a virtual assistant that can respond to customers and also supply more useful information to business agents. Watson can help businesses “seamlessly automate tasks — from addressing customer requests to guiding employees through internal processes” all to help provide better service internally and externally. They also have a free assessment that helps evaluate your business and highlight where AI could help.

2. Microsoft Bot Framework

This platform helps business build, connect, publish, and manage smarter chatbots. It comes with active learning and includes pre-existing, pre-build models that allow your AI software to interact with users on chat program they’re already using, such as Skype, Slack, Facebook Messenger, Cortana, Microsoft Teams, Kik, and more. It is a full-service solution for natural language processing bot development.

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