The top three must-haves for best-in-class travel and hospitality customer self-service in the revenge-travel era and beyond

Remember that vacation that was canceled? That cousin’s wedding postponed, twice? A visit to relatives delayed?

In 2022, people around the world are clicking “book trip” more and more to make up for nearly 2 years of lost time and travel plans. The result? The revenge-travel era.

This key trend is creating a surge in travel, which is continuing to drive demand even after a busy holiday season. It is responsible for packed airports, volatile airfare prices and scheduling changes, and crowded beaches. And of course, headline-making customer service complaints!

With a surge in travel demand comes a surge in requests for customer support. Except, after years of Zoom meetings and remote work, travelers have higher customer support standards and expect better, faster 24/7 service now than they did 2 years ago. These new expectations come at a time when a significant portion of the hospitality industry is struggling to meet pre-COVID-19 pandemic customer expectations due to staffing shortages, inclement weather, and other uncontrollable factors.

Regardless, the bar has been raised and a new standard has been set—and many companies are looking to apply sophisticated automation to help take the pressure off their call centers or make an overall improvement to their support!

Here are the top three strategic customer self-service must-haves that travel and hospitality companies are employing to meet and exceed this new standard to get them through the revenge-travel era and beyond.

Multimodal

Today, humans are used to interacting with multiple modalities (for example, vision, speech, and others) simultaneously. How many of us are guilty of texting while watching a TV show or movie? (Cringe, guilty!) Or listening to someone give instructions while clicking on a screen?

Through multimodal customer self-service, customers no longer have to rely on just one method to share required information. The days of customers using an outmoded method of spelling out their last names vocally to a voice assistant are so 2017! Instead, use multimodal technology to text or email the customer a link—in near real time—to type to confirm their last name, all the while patiently guiding them through the process using automated voice.

When multimodal capabilities are applied to customer self-service, travelers engage through reading, listening, watching, and doing—just as a live agent might help a customer but without the need for the customer to wait and speak to an agent. This increases the level of automation (taking the pressure off call centers) and gives the power back to the customer to resolve their inquiries themselves.

Omnichannel

The key to supporting multimodal customer self-service is omni- or multichannel support. In the age of remote work, customers have learned to switch back and forth between methods of communication quickly, moving from video calls to Slack messages, emails, and more, all to discuss one topic.

In the revenge-travel era, brands with the best customer support are making channel switching and cross-channel conversations readily available as part of automated customer self-service. The multimodal example of using text or email to capture last names? Omni/multichannel support is essential to enhancing that engagement.

Not only does omni/multichannel support help deliver a multimodal customer self-service experience, but it also helps customers reach out to customer support in the method of their choice, making the needed support more readily available for people of all abilities. Whether the customer has a disability that prevents them from using the phone or is situationally disabled (for example, driving a car and is unable to text), omni/multichannel support is more inclusive, and it gives the power to the customer to resolve their own inquiries in the modality most comfortable and available to them.

Personalization

The importance of personalization in self-service cannot be understated. Either at the time of booking a trip or from frequent-traveler records, companies gather critical information about their customers: names, travel dates, preferences, and more. Use it!

In exchange for that information, customers expect that information to be used to deliver a better customer experience. That expectation not only applies to the actual trip itself but also extends into customer self-service. It’s a better user experience when customers are individually recognized by the brand, rather than being just a number or generic “valued customer.”

Instead of automated “Hi, how can I help you today?” messages, customers want support that shows that the brand recognizes them and advances the conversation. Wouldn’t “Hi [Name], I see you have an upcoming trip on [Date]. Is this what you’re calling about?” be a better way to start?

When used effectively, personalization can increase engagement, amplifying the self-service experience in a way that encourages the customer inquiry to flow and speeds a resolution. Escalations to a live person (agent) are reduced, which can positively impact the efficiency of your company and the bottom line.

Getting started with conversational AI

Brands looking to meet the new standard of customer service are implementing automated solutions that are multimodal, omnichannel, and personalized, like the Conversations by NLX platform. The Conversations by NLX platform contains built-in integration with products and services from Amazon Web Services (AWS) that brands already know, use, and trust. These services include

• Amazon Connect, where businesses can set up a contact center in minutes that can scale to support millions of customers;
• Amazon Pinpoint, which offers marketers and developers one customizable service to deliver customer communications across channels;
• AWS Lambda, a serverless, event-driven compute service that lets you run code for virtually any type of application or backend service; and others.
• Amazon Lex, a fully managed artificial intelligence (AI) service with advanced natural language models to design, build, test, and deploy conversational interfaces in applications.

There’s no need to hire a third party to make changes. Agility is built into the Conversations by NLX platform so that brands can universally build, deploy, and update automated conversations in rapid response to changing conditions. Within the platform, both technical and nontechnical teams can quickly design, build, and manage all their customer conversations in one place.

NLX’s enterprise-grade technology is System and Organization Controls (SOC) 2 Type II and HIPAA compliant, and it has usage-based pricing so that brands pay for only what they use. Furthermore, the solution is scalable, no-code, and easily customizable to match your brand.

Using conversational AI, travel and hospitality companies will be better equipped to support their customers through random spikes in demand, unforeseen events, and whatever else is next.

Experience multimodal, omnichannel, personalized self-service

These three ingredients for a better customer experience are best exemplified in an interactive travel and hospitality demonstration that puts you in the customer’s shoes, allowing you to test-drive what complete, personalized, automated conversations look like on a fully qualified conversational AI platform, illustrated through use cases like check-in, upgrade booking, cancel reservation, and more. Go to the experience now or watch the demo video.

The demo was crafted using the Conversations by NLX platform—available in the AWS Marketplace, a place to find, test, buy, and deploy software that runs on AWS—and showcases the beginning of what conversational AI can do.