How hospitality companies can use AI to learn quicker than their competitors

How many customer interactions do you have a week?

How many do you learn from?

Let’s say you’re a 10 site independent coffee shop business and each site does roughly £10,000 a week. So you’ve probably got 1,500 to 2,000 customer transactions per coffee shop per week. That’s 15,000 to 20,000 across the whole business.

Now when you add up all those Google reviews, Facebook likes, complaints and feedback form submissions, how many pieces of customer feedback do you get a week? Probably about 300 to 400 a week.

That’s just 2% of your customers.

Which means 98% of your customer interactions are a missed opportunity.

Now imagine you’re running an e-commerce site. If you have 20,000 customers landing on your site every week, you’ll learn something from every single one. You’d be able to identify who bought what and who dropped out without buying. You’d know where every customer came from, who reacted to a retargeting ad, and which offers work best for which persona. 

You’d be learning 100x faster than the hospitality business. Every single week.

Now… AI may be awesome, but it isn’t going to get 98% of my customers to start leaving you a Google review.

But, your frontline teams are on the other side of every single one of those 20,000 weekly customer interactions.

And with AI you can start to harness the collective intelligence of your business by systematically capturing their insights on a daily or weekly basis.

As we’ve talked about in previous blogs, you can get AI agents to manage processes and to answer questions… but you can also set them up to ask questions and run mini ‘enquiries’ using natural language processing.

So for example, you could create an agent that gets feedback from your team on a new menu launch, by setting it up with a prompt like:

“Please ask my team for feedback on our new menu. Try to help me identify if the new menu is creating any operational challenges. Ask my team what their favourite new dish is and why. And get their feedback on what seems to be working well for customers and what we could improve.” 

Or you set up an agent to ask anyone on your team with a child under the age of 13 what they think you could do to improve the experience you give to families.

Or ask all of your vegan team members what they think of the new vegan special.

Or you could ask your teams for ideas on how to reduce waste and energy consumption.

Or get an agent to do a retrospective for everyone who was involved in a new opening.

AI gives you the opportunity to completely rewire how insight and feedback flows through your business.

Instead of an annual or quarterly engagement survey, that may contain a handful of questions about your customer experience, you can create a conversation with your frontline teams about how you can improve the business. And you can use natural language processing to get actionable insight.

The hospitality companies that seize this opportunity will learn and improve quicker than their competitors. And I think they’ll also create much more interesting, engaging jobs for frontline team members, who’ll be able to interact with agents that enable them to meaningfully influence the strategy and performance of the business. 

If you’d like to find out how Youda can help you create the collective intelligence that would enable you to learn quicker than your competitors,  please book a demo call here. 

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