What messaging platforms are best for your hotel?
Messaging platforms have opened the whole new window for businesses to interact with their customers. According to a study, 54% of online users say that they prefer messaging platforms over email, phone and online chat to communicate with brands.
Much of this trend boils down to usage pattern. With millions of people using chat apps for day to day communications with friends and family, it becomes easier for them to interact over chat apps with their favorite brands and businesses, including hotels.
Chat apps have completely changed the way guests used to communicate with hotels in Kolkata before, during and after their stay. Chat apps are used for booking queries, ordering room service, raising a question about the best dining spaces and many other purposes.
But how would one understand which platform is the best for their hotel? In this ongoing post we’ll have a look at some of the most useful chat apps which will help you to serve your guests with improved level of service and interaction.
WhatsApp continues to achieve new milestones, most recently by reaching 1.5 billion users and making an announcement that they handle a daily of 60 billion messages. After its acquisition by Facebook in 2014, the success of this messaging app is sort of mindboggling with 450 million monthly active users.
In order to connect with guests, WhatsApp is the biggest tool for hotels due to its worldwide reach and availability. There is even more opportunity for marketers to tap and capitalize on with the launch of an app that is specifically designed for business profiles.
With the aim to help small and medium-sized companies, this app allows companies to create a business-specific WhatsApp profile that contains handy information like business’s email address, geographical address, website and description.
This app is also making it easier for hotel in Kalyani to communicate with their customers. It does so with the help of a smart messaging tool that provides faster replies to frequently asked questions, sends greeting messages and displays away messages for the customers to inform that their business is busy.
Businesses can also keep a track of the messaging statistics that includes useful information like volume of messages. The availability of this app on desktops has added more to its convenience.
Facebook Messenger
Pretty popular among the users, this chat based app is used by 1.3 billion people. With a continuous growth in users, it has recently launched a series of updates, such as Sponsored messages And News Feed-style ads.
With the number of businesses going over 65 million, Facebook is also evolving more business friendly enhancements. This includes a new chat feature which eases the interaction between hotels and customers and also supports online hotel booking ads.
The most notable among all these is a customer chat plug-in which is currently in its development stage. This plug-in allows businesses to integrate messenger into their own websites. With the facility to carry over your chat history, this feature allows them to start chat with a customer via the messenger plug-in on their website and then resume it at a later point on the messenger app on their smart phones.
Hotels that conduct their business in foreign markets can also benefit themselves with Messenger’s integrated natural language processing (NLP) which now supports 10 new languages to its existing repertoire. NLP can scan the messages sent by your guests to detect meaning and intent in them.
In another landmark development, businesses that are using subscription-based messaging can now widen the scope of conversation by messaging multiple clients at the same time, possible through a single API request. This means that hotel can now roll out a massive update through messenger to all its subscribers.
Seeing all these new developments it is becoming clear that some big announcements will come out in a few months. So, it is better to keep up with these developments to avail Messenger’s increasing business functionality.
This app was launched in 2011 and is now China’s biggest chat app with more than 980 million monthly active users. This makes it one of the biggest standalone apps around the globe. It is unnecessary to mention that travel brands who are trying to tap into the booming Chinese travel market.
Destination Canada has shown great success by using WeChat to drive Chinese travelers to Canada. In explicit, contents that feature images of nature garner the best engagement levels with one post receiving over more than 48,00 views.
Data analysis experts have found that brands who post more than three times a week to their WeChat official accounts earned almost double viewership as compared to brands who post less.
Although WeChat has seen huge success in China, it lacks the much required global coverage. Despite all its efforts, tapping the U.S. market is still a huge challenge before them. But widespread use of this app in China makes it essential for your business if you want to tap the Chinese market.
These are some of the best messaging platforms that you can use for your hotel business to connect with customers and convert them into sales.
