Based on the types of requests hotel call centers have received in the past year, hotel guests appear to be reverting to more normal travel patterns.
A year ago, customers were contacting Hyatt Hotels' call centers primarily for help with changing plans due to disruptions in travel, or for answers they couldn't find themselves.
Jessica White, Hyatt's senior vice president of global property and guest services, said guests today are calling to plan trips around special occasions and particular times of the year.
Hyatt's call center employees, nearly all of whom work remotely, continue to field calls from prospective guests who are at the beginning of their booking phase and looking for travel recommendations.
"The guest may not have a specific location in mind, but they know they want to go somewhere. Our [global property and guest services] colleagues are more than happy to assist based on their specific needs and preferences," White said via email.
Anita Travis, vice president of contact center operations at Hawaii-based Outrigger Resorts, said the company uses private call center Travel Outlook. Travel Outlook is an off-site central reservation service that acts as the primary reservations department for hotels or handles overflow.
There were two characteristics Outrigger looked for in choosing a call center to partner with: flexibility of scale and a business contingency.
"All of our team is located in Denver. Should we have some major power or internet outage, that would be really impactful to us. It was really important to us that we had a partner in place so that we limited our liability from a business contingency standpoint," Travis said.
Tapping a partner to source out some calls has also allowed Outrigger's contact center operations to extend its hours of service to 24/7 without needing its core team to work overnight.
"We had not done that before because such small volume came in overnight. It was really hard to staff to that," she said. "Consequently, we were actually able to scale back our hours of operation ... we're able to offer more desirable shifts to our core team; so no more overnight shifts."
Travis said Outrigger treats its partner as an extension of its team.
"We picked them in a way that we would if we were recruiting more people for our team," she added.
From January to Aug. 8, Travis said incoming calls reflected normal travel requests. After that, many were related to the wildfires that erupted on West Maui.
"Aug. 9 and beyond, it's been different, relocating guests, moving them to different islands or rescheduling travel for future months," she added. "But prior to that, it was much more normalized, much more balanced; not so much of travel being disrupted."
Outrigger's contact center has learned that guests are still shopping around on multiple channels for the best deal before booking, she said.
Common phrases heard from customers include, "I've been doing some research" and "I was on xyz website," she said.
"For us, we get a lot of questions that are destination-specific, specifically Hawaii, where some people have never traveled. They may be unclear on which island they want to visit," Travis added.
Operational Enhancements
On the operations side, hotel call centers are increasingly investing in technology such as artificial intelligence.
"AI has incredible potential," White said. "AI-powered chat and voice channels can achieve higher customer engagement, improve response times, increase the level of personalization with each interaction and, most notably, help call centers learn more from customer interactions by analyzing customer feedback."
Hyatt's use of AI improves guest recommendations, she said.
White said guests are shifting the way they prefer to interact with call centers.
"After introducing chat as a messaging option close to two years ago, we've noticed growth in the number of guests who choose to utilize chat over voice. We of course still have a number of guests that want to talk to us via voice and are happy to follow their lead on mode of communication," she said.
"Hyatt went from almost no conversations before the pandemic to nearly 30% of all interactions today being via chat. By evolving alongside guests' preferences, we have the opportunity to increase guest satisfaction and loyalty and in turn secure more bookings," White added.
Outrigger, too, is bringing AI into its operations. Travis said it's not a "must-have," though.
"It's important to understand that if you're going to implement AI, [you know] what your 'why' is," she said.
There are 30 to 40 core frequently-asked questions that are fielded by Outrigger's contact center, and for those a virtual assistant component can offer quick answers, she said.
Customers are asked, "'While you're waiting for an agent, is there anything I can help you with?' What we found is guests are willing to engage with the virtual assistant. In 25% to 26% of the cases, we're able to answer their inquiry. They get everything they need and they actually disconnect the call ... they're not waiting in a queue that's longer than needed just to get maybe the address to the hotel ... or what options do I have for ground transportation to get to the hotel," Travis said.
In some instances, Outrigger can push a text to the guest with the hotel's address or a contact that can help transport them to the property.
In terms of average speed of answer, Travis said 15 seconds or less would be a time frame that most customers are satisfied with. Outrigger's average answer speed year to date is about 8 seconds.
Though Outrigger is multi-channel, offering assistance via phone, live web chat, email, social media and a virtual assistant, Travis said phone is still the most popular channel its customers use.
Employee Training
Hyatt is re-evaluating how it is organizing, training and empowering its call center teams, White said.
"Specifically, we've introduced new agile ways of working across Hyatt, which helps us work more efficiently and nimbly. With this agile mindset, team members across Hyatt's global call centers, offices and hotels are encouraged to try news things, delegate decisions and prioritize different perspectives when solving problems — all essential in communicating with guests and customers in today's environment of constantly changing expectations," she added.
Hyatt has also introduced its "Learn, Grow and Lead" program, which supports employees' career development.
Multilingual Communication
Travis said people want to speak in their own native language, and it's important for hoteliers to understand the demographic of who is traveling to their properties.
Outrigger has website translation and voice support in Japanese and Korean. It also has French and German translation.
"That [European] market has been emerging based on some of the acquisitions and properties that we've added. As we increase languages that are traveling to those properties, we want to make sure we have native speakers that can speak to those guests in their preferred language," she added.
Hyatt's call centers are global, with staff who communicate in multiple languages.
Its global property and guest services team will also guide guests to contact specific call centers in the region they are staying as "the familiarity and understanding of a destination allows team members to provide personal anecdotes or recommendations that enhances the planning process and leads to deeper, more personal interactions," she added.