6 Ways To Boost Your Hospitality Contact Center with Generative AI

Are you struggling with low CSAT scores in your hospitality contact center? Are you looking for ways to automate your contact center processes and start using AI to eliminate some of your biggest pain points? 

Here at MiaRec, we have helped more than a thousand businesses worldwide (some of them are large hospitality companies) to increase their contact centers' efficiency and profitability. Beyond that, they improved their customers' experiences, resulting in higher guest loyalty and advocacy. 

If you feel a little hesitant about AI or don't know where to start with Contact Center AI, this article is for you. As a former contact center manager, I know the struggles you face every day and I have put together six ways in which Generative AI-based contact center solutions will not only help, but also have a dramatic impact on your contact center performance. All of the suggestions below are easy and quick ROI ways to dip your toes into utilizing AI in your contact center!

Get 100% QA Coverage, Even During The Busy Holiday Season

Most hospitality businesses are currently manually evaluating their agents' performance. This means a QA team will pick a call (often at random, for lack of a better way) and re-listen to it while scoring their performance based on an Excel-based or other type of manual scorecard. Because this is not only time-consuming, labor-intensive, and inefficient but also results in low CSAT scores and poor customer experiences, many hotels, restaurants, theme parks, and other hospitality companies are looking to automate the process.

You could automate your QA process and score 100% of the relevant calls automatically based on a customizable scorecard tailored to your needs. This gives you much more visibility into what is happening in your contact center and instantly lets you identify those calls that require human follow-up or further investigation, e.g., those calls that fall below a predefined performance or sentiment analysis score, or calls in which competitors are mentioned (see below).

In addition, hotels and other hospitality businesses experience seasonal spikes in inquiries, resulting in contact centers struggling to scale their quality monitoring efforts to match increased call volumes. Auto QA ensures 100% coverage, even during peak seasons. 

Image: Screenshot from the MiaRec application showing a partial portion of a completed Auto QA evaluation. 

Automatically Flag Calls That Mention Competitors 

The hospitality business is highly competitive, and many of the companies we spoke to mentioned that they are losing business to their competitors. The thing is, some of the attrition is preventable. Through a manual review of call recordings, these hotel chains and other larger hospitality businesses found that their customers were mentioning competitors, e.g., "Hotel X is cheaper than the price you just offered me," or "Why would I stay with you if I can stay at [competitor] for less?"

With Generative AI-based Topical Analysis, you can automatically identify every call that mentions a competitor. In addition, because Generative AI understands the context of the conversation, it will add a few key topics to the metadata of the call. This allows you to instantly filter your calls by competitors mentioned and see in which context they were mentioned. For example, customers announce that they want to cancel their reservation because they got offered an upgrade for the same price at hotel XXX. Or they complain that the hotel they are staying has ongoing construction and they would like to switch to you. Both times, competitor names were mentioned, but the reasons are very different.

Image: Screenshot from the MiaRec application showing LLM-powered Topic Analysis flagging a call where a competitor (T-Mobile) is mentioned. 

Improved PCI Compliance Adherence 

One of my biggest pet peeves as a former contact center manager is agents not pausing the recording or — even worse — physically writing down customers' credit card numbers or other personal information. That is just wild! Hello, PCI compliance. You and I both know that that is not only negligent but is reckless behavior that needs to stop right now. 

While contact center AI can not (yet) stop your agents from physically writing down personal details (only you can, sorry!), it can eliminate the problem of not pausing. Generative AI-based auto redaction tools will use their contextual understanding to not only detect sensitive information but also redact it from the transcript and the audio file so you can drastically improve your PCI compliance adherence. 

Image: Screenshot from the MiaRec application showing LLM-powered Data Redaction automatically redacting credit card info (number and security code) from a call's audio file and transcript. 

Drastically Shorten Call Handling Times 

After-call work, like manually writing call summaries, hugely impacts your handling times. Most agents take anywhere from 2-5 minutes to summarize the call contents and the next steps. Again, Generative AI in the form of Auto Call Summaries comes to the rescue. Because Gen AI has contextual understanding, it can automatically and accurately summarize your call (including the next steps if they were discussed during the call), and generate a summary automatically.

Image: Screenshot from the MiaRec application showing a call summary that was automatically generated by AI.

With MiaRec, you can customize your prompts, so you can even tell the AI how you would like your summary to be: short and concise in bullet points, detailed and in paragraphs, and so on. This feature alone can provide a huge ROI.

Discover Missed Revenue Or Loyalty Program Opportunities 

Agents often miss opportunities to up-sell, cross-sell, or position the loyalty program due to the lack of training or missed cues in the conversation.

For example, the agent could offer room upgrades, dining packages, or spa treatments while taking a new reservation. These up-and-cross-sell opportunities can lead to a much better customer experience (as the guest might not have been aware of these options) and, of course, they can help increase the revenue generated by a single guest. In addition, the agents could use this opportunity to promote loyalty programs effectively or explain their benefits to guests.

Contact center AI can help identify those missed opportunities by flagging the call as a potential up- or cross-sell candidate or identifying conversations that did not cover the loyalty program. Your agents can then follow up with these guests and offer them an upgrade or additional services. 

Image: Screenshot from the MiaRec application showing how AI can easily identify missed up- and cross-sell opportunities. 

Gain More Insight Into Common Guest Concerns Or Complaints

Do you clearly understand what your guests are most worried or concerned about? Do you know what they complain about after they leave? By using Generative AI, you can automatically evaluate all calls to discover your guests' fears, worries, and concerns, as well as their complaints, and proactively address them.

For example, customers might be worried about how to get to the hotel late at night. Maybe you offer a shuttle bus, or a taxi service is always available. You can add this information to your website and train your agents to mention this as they take new reservations.

Additionally, this allows you to keep track of recurring guest issues, such as frequent complaints about booking systems, room amenities, or staff behavior. By identifying these, you can improve your booking system, upgrade your room amenities, and train your staff to provide a better customer experience.

Image: Screenshot of a report generated in the MiaRec application showing the most common reasons for guests calling in accompanied by the sentiment label of those calls. This data would provide crystal-clear insight into how your guests are feeling when they're speaking to your staff about particular products or services. 

Conclusion

Generative AI-based contact center solutions can drastically impact your contact center performance, whether that is by automating your QA processes, shortening call handling times, or improving PCI compliance. They can also help you increase revenue and profitability by flagging calls where competitor names are mentioned, identifying missed revenue opportunities, and giving you more insight into your guests' concerns or complaints.

Whether you have never tried AI in your contact center, use it sporadically, or have been disappointed with another solution before, I encourage you to try it out in a free trial. You will be surprised by the power of Generative AI. Have questions? Feel free to reach out. I am happy to help.