You have understood the value of livechat to increase your sales, but you are wondering how to optimize its efficiency? After several years of specialization in the implementation of live chat, HDB Solutions reveals its best practices !

Respect the standards of customer relations by Chat

Answer quickly, but really quickly!

This is the basis for properly managing a livechat.

A visitor spends only 2min30 on a hotel site. It is estimated that his request for assistance must be answered in less than 30 seconds.

Small note also on the spelling: respond quickly but do not forget to read again, there is nothing worse to make a bad impression.

Be available 24 hours a day

It is essential if your clientele is foreign or to respond to the hectic of work!

HDB advisors can help you meet your customers even when you are not available.

Have multi-lingual salespeople

You can use the google translator for a few words but if you want to chat fluently with a visitor in their native language it’s better to have bilingual staff.

Supervise commercial chats in real time

Managing your salespeople will help you increase your chat satisfaction. With the HDB livechat, you can observe in real time the conversations of your salespeople and help them by suggesting responses. You can also organize their work to be more efficient, by asking them to manage several chats at the same time. At HDB, the rule for our agents is 3 simultaneous chats for a junior salesperson and 6 simultaneous chats for a senior salesperson.

Optimized your commercial speech

To optimize the efficiency of your livechat, you have to understand that producing simple answers to pragmatic questions, of the type, « do you have a parking lot? » – « Yes, we do have a parking lot » is largely insufficient. Your customers seek above all to check the quality of your service through the livechat. You have to be in a real professional commercial approach.

Pre-build your sales pitch

The HDB solution allows you to pre-build your answers:

• frequently asked questions
• to highlight commercial offers
• to clarify recurring subjects that often worry your customers.
  These pre-written responses are then stored under hashtag, for example #Parking, to facilitate their rapid use during the chat.

This allows you to take the time to think about organized and reasoned answers rather than doing it in a rush of chat conversion.

For instance, if you are a hotel on a roadside, and a worried customer asks you if it is disturbing, in the rush of the conversation, you can answer « it is true that there is a road but we get few complaints from customers about it.  » While preparing your answer, you could have foreseen real more powerful arguments « This small department is very little frequented, and it is even less the case at night. In addition we had speed bumps installed on the part close to the hotel to guarantee security and limit noise pollution as much as possible.If peace is important to you, we can select a personalized room, on the courtyard side with a view of the lake and far from the road ».

Offer customized services

Offering personalized services adapted to the client’s profile that you were able to identify during the conversation is really the strong point of this tool. This allows you to increase your average basket while increasing customer satisfaction. Be careful however, if the offer you are offering is not relevant, it may annoy the customer who will feel too solicited.

If we take the previous example, the offer « If great calm is important to you, we can select a personalized room, courtyard side overlooking the lake and away from the road. Would you be interested? » seems perfectly suited and the client will feel listened to, and will not perceive your intervention as an intrusive sale.

This requires a real sense of customer relationship and listening to get to do it live by chat.

Engage abandoned visitors

Thanks to the chat, you can also start a conversation with your hesitant visitors. If you notice that a visitor stays on your website for a long time without deciding to book, you can start the conversation directly. All in an automated way and configured according to your expectations with HDB. Suggesting a special offer is very effective, with a message like « Hello, would you like to take advantage of a special offer », and then offer a free breakfast for instance.

Cross-selling 

If you are the owner of several hotels, you can, thanks to the chat, offer the client to stay in another of your properties, which better meets their criteria. It can prevent them from turning to the competition.

Be more convincing with semantic analysis

Analyzing your results is essential to optimize your chat solution.

With HDB, all questions are classified into categories for better analysis.

If a simple analysis can be useful to improve your website or to know for which questions to pre-design answers, we recommend a further analysis. By combining the type of response with the conversion rate or the satisfaction rate, you can better target your areas of improvement and adapt accordingly.

Break the tariff parity with the Chat

With tariff parity, prices on OTAs are always equal (or even lower) than those displayed on your booking engine. This prevents you from making the reservation on your official website more advantageous for customers. But the chat allows you to not just lower the official price visible on your booking engine but actually lower the price for travelers. But how ? Thanks to the chat, you can offer promotional codes to activate when booking. OTAs are not aware of this price change (since the price displayed on your booking engine does not change) and this will allow you to sell cheaper on your official site than on OTAs.