You want to do the best for our customers, but sometimes you’re restricted by internal factors, like time, budget, geographical location, IR rules, staff availability, scheduling rosters, and floor space. You can’t fix all of these problems, but you might be surprised just how much you can address using AI. Done right, AI can shift customer experience from system-driven to truly customer-centered, creating value that simply wasn’t possible before, and giving you a competitive edge.
I was recently speaking at a conference on the Gold Coast, staying overnight at a hotel before my closing keynote presentation the next day. The hotel check-in time was 2pm, but I only arrived at 8pm. But they didn’t give me a later check-out to make up for those six hours I “missed out”, even though I told them in advance I would be arriving late.
Of course, this is how hotels work everywhere. They have a fixed check-in time and a fixed check-out time, regardless of when you arrive or leave. You might be lucky and get an early check-in or a late check-out. But apart from that flexibility, you’re only entitled to the hotel’s hours.
Wouldn’t it be great if I could have told the hotel my later arrival time (which I did), and they would have extended the check-out time to still give me the same overall time?
Now, don’t get me wrong! Most of my travel is for work, so the less travel time the better. So I’m not asking for myself specifically, but as an idea for hotels to improve their overall customer experience.
I’m not the first person to ask this question, and in fact some hotels have experimented with this in the past. You get, say, 20 hours, starting from time you arrive, as long as you nominate that time in advance (so they can manage occupancy, cleaning, and so on).
This is called the “day-based” or “rolling stay” model, but it’s far from common – and mostly used by a few boutique hotels or some special hotels (like airport hotels). And it’s not hard to see why: It’s a huge logistical challenge. You need to manage every room’s occupancy and availability individually, coordinate cleaning staff schedules, manage reception staff numbers, and much, much more.
But it’s not impossible.
Especially with AI.
In fact, this is a perfect job for AI.
AI can easily take all of these things into account. It can assign available rooms, coordinate staff rosters, and manage complex logistics at scale. It can even use past behaviour of customers to predict their likely future bookings, or predict occupancy based on seasons or weather predictions.
Of course, even if AI can create the schedules, there are still challenges implementing that schedule – for example, scheduling staff. But the point is that something which was previously “impossible” not at least becomes plausible.
I don’t expect many hotels to start adopting this model anytime soon. But that’s because the industry as a whole is quite happy to preserve the status quo and force this imperfect experience on their customers.
And this is just one example of applying AI to go beyond just making your existing processes more efficient, but to create new opportunities.
Stop thinking:
“That’s the way we’ve always done it.”
“That’s the way everybody else does it.”
and start asking:
“How could we use AI to do it differently?”
If you did, you could create a huge competitive advantage for your business.
For more ideas like this, join my online presentation next week about using AI for better customer experience. It’s free, public, and open to all.
