Hotel customer service

Leverage hotel customer service software to create better guest and employee experiences, increase referrals, and enhance your reputation.

A guide to the best hotel customer service software

Last updated November 20, 2024

The impact of online vacation rental marketplaces like Airbnb turned the hospitality industry on its head in the early aughts. However, hotels are now seeing a resurgence in popularity by raising the bar with white-glove customer experiences (CX) and by investing in industry-leading customer service software.

Regardless of whether you operate a hotel or a vacation rental, the key to increasing revenue and referrals is finding the perfect blend of support, amenities, convenience, and affordability.

The tips we share in this guide apply to any accommodations-based business. Read on to learn more, or click through our table of contents to jump ahead.

What is hotel customer service?
Why is it essential for hotels to provide great customer service?
7 best practices for improving customer service in a hotel
Hospitality customer care trends in 2023
FAQ on providing outstanding customer service in hotels
Deliver 5-star hotel customer service with Zendesk

What is hotel customer service?

Hotel customer service is the care hotels provide to guests before, during, and after their stay. Some examples of customer service in a hotel include helping guests:

Book hotel reservations.
Make last-minute cancellations.
Block off rooms for big events.
Find local events, restaurants, and things to do.
Upgrade their package.
Learn about available amenities.
Request special accommodations.

Hotels can also introduce self-service alternatives like a knowledge base, FAQ, or help center so travelers can easily find the information they need to make educated decisions about their trip.

Why is it essential for hotels to provide great customer service?

Providing exemplary customer service doesn’t just ensure that hotel guests have a great stay—improve your brand’s reputation, boost referrals, and increase customer retention. Ultimately, investing in guest services can generate more revenue for the hotel.

It wasn’t that long ago that travelers would book hotels without knowing much about the accommodations or property. Today, prospective travelers research extensively online and often turn to friends, family, review sites, and social media to decide if a hotel or rental is worth their hard-earned money.

This can have a huge impact on hotel bookings.

For example, someone may broadcast a negative hotel review on the internet—and millions may see it before the hotel is even aware that something went wrong. One bad, widespread review could tarnish a hotel’s reputation long term. However, when hotel managers and staff members strive to provide excellent guest services and word spreads, travelers looking for a positive experience are more likely to place a reservation.

7 best practices for improving customer service in a hotel

By equipping your team with the right software and following these 7 best practices—any hotel from a local bread and breakfast to a global brand can deliver outstanding guest experiences.

1. Use 360-degree customer views to better understand your guests

Customer service software can help hotels better understand their customers by creating a 360-degree customer view–the concept of consolidating data from various customer touchpoints and systems in one place. Centralizing customer information helps hotels better predict their guests' wants, needs, and questions, ultimately creating better-personalized guest experiences.

For example, with Zendesk, hotels can display a customer’s complete travel record in agents’ interface by integrating data from reservation software, loyalty programs, baggage systems, and more. This eliminates the need for context and app switching, ensuring agents can quickly access customers’ travel history, reservation information, loyalty program details, and travel preferences to personalize services and offers.

2. Onboard and train hotel staff

Because hotels rely heavily on loyal customers and strong word-of-mouth marketing, training representatives on customer service and accommodation offerings is an integral part of any successful hotel’s customer-centric service strategy. The staff training process can be difficult to perfect, but doing so will encourage hotel guests to return again and again.

5 ways to train a 5-star guest services team

To help your team nail customer service, provide a well-rounded onboarding and training experience to educate them on the hotel’s brand values as well as the most effective ways to resolve customer complaints and questions. Hotel customer service training is an ongoing process and often includes methods such as:

Attending hospitality industry retreats
Reviewing hotel documents and guidelines
Participating in one-on-one coaching sessions
Cross-training in different departments or positions
Completing online learning modules with quizzes

3. Make the most of customer feedback

Customer feedback is a data goldmine that businesses can extract key insights from to enhance the customer experience. Feedback can come from several different channels—such as surveys, customer support data, interviews, focus groups, online reviews, and community forums—and provide baseline information and insights.

The customer service software tool you use should make it easy to collect and analyze customer feedback. For example, with Zendesk, you can send surveys and track advanced analytics to measure every interaction and see what’s working well and which issues customers complain about the most.

To gain further insight, staff can also engage with customers until their hotel stay concludes to provide a warm, friendly experience while collecting information and context.

4. Meet customers where they are

Your hotel customer experience software should integrate with every channel that guests can contact you through to increase customer satisfaction and retention.

Chat and messaging channels like Messenger, Instagram, and Apple Messages for Business provide a convenient way for guests to ask questions and get help before, during, and after their stay. For example, the Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts uses Zendesk to enable guests to message hotel staff in their local language. All past and present interaction data automatically syncs to Zendesk. So, when guests arrive, the Four Seasons hotel staff has everything they need to personalize experiences during their stay.

Marco Trecroce, the CIO of the Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, believes that conversational messaging is one of the best ways to impress guests, reduce support time, and maintain a world-class standard of care.

4. Meet customers where they are

Your hotel customer experience software should integrate with every channel that guests can contact you through to increase customer satisfaction and retention.

5. Go above and beyond

You don’t have to spend a lot of money to surprise a guest with something thoughtful. Memorable service comes from listening closely to what your guests say and trying to make their stay more enjoyable. By going the extra mile, you’ll be able to build relationships with your guests and foster customer loyalty.

Some ways to do this include:

Budgeting: Set aside some money each month to cover nice surprises and add-ons for guests.
Personalization: Pay attention to your guest’s data and your conversations to identify personalization opportunities.
Proactive support: Assess frequent guest requests or feedback from a past stay to anticipate their needs.

6. Manage guest expectations

You can't always trace a customer’s frustration back to a specific hospitality misstep. That said, here are some ways to deal with angry customers:

Before an issue arises: Be very transparent about hotel policies to ensure customers are booking with realistic expectations. You should also disclose ways to request help and report problems so guests feel assured that there will be accountability for any issues they encounter.
After an issue arises: Stay calm and positive, listen actively, and empathize with the guest. Once you clearly understand the problem, work quickly and efficiently to resolve it. If possible, send them a discount or gift to ensure they leave with a positive view of the experience.

7. Equip representatives with the right tools

Good customer service is next to impossible without the right software. Here are the top tools and capabilities you should look for when choosing the best customer service software for your hotel:

Omnichannel customer service, which enables agents to provide rich, seamless, and personalized experiences across channels
AI-powered response recommendations to help agents resolve tickets faster
Chatbots, which are capable of answering FAQs 24/7
Intelligent routing, which directs customers to agents based on factors such as skill, capacity, and customer sentiment
Knowledge base tools and FAQ software that enable customers and employees to find answers independently
Prewritten responses that speed up replies to common questions or complaints

Hospitality customer care trends in 2023

To understand the value of hospitality and provide guest services that impress, stay on top of the most current trends in the hotel industry. Here are a few customer service highlights from the Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report 2023.

75% of hospitality businesses expect ticket volume to increase over the next year.
77% of businesses believe that investing in CX positively impacts profitability.
71% of leaders in the hospitality space think it’s important to build more fluid customer experiences.
77% of businesses say personalization increases customer retention.
67% of hospitality organizations will increase spending on customer service and experience personalization in the next year.
The average customer satisfaction (CSAT score) in the hospitality industry is 90.

FAQ on providing outstanding customer service in hotels

For more information, here are answers to the most common questions about offering excellent customer service in the hospitality industry.

1. What is the best chatbot for hotel customer service?

The best chatbot for hotel customer service is Zendesk. That’s because our chatbot software:

Enables instant service across channels for guests on the go
Increases agent productivity by passing key context to agents
Comes pre-trained on billions of real customer service interactions to save teams time for manual setup
Can be integrated with other systems for more personalized experiences
Can be deployed in minutes using our no-code bot builder

2. What is an example of good service in the hospitality industry?

Minor Hotels is an international hotel brand with over 550 hotels in 55 countries. Using Zendesk, the hotel chain has grown its reputation and achieved high levels of guest satisfaction by providing immediate, personalized support via live chat.

Since 2017, the hotel has seen a 40 percent decrease in first response times and a strong increase in satisfaction.

“Customers like instantaneous service and personalization,” says K’Lee Challinger, the Social Media Optimization and Real-Time Customer Service Manager at Minor Hotels. “We maintain a CSAT [customer satisfaction] score of 97 percent, further highlighting this point. At the end of the day, we’re trying to make ourselves easily approachable so we can drive more bookings and conversions to our website rather than have customers default to other travel and booking sites.”

Deliver 5-star customer experiences

Customer service software helps hotels provide excellent customer experiences, from booking to checkout.

Zendesk provides a complete customer service solution that gives travel and hospitality companies the resources and tools they need to deliver VIP-level customer experiences before, during, and after a trip on any channel. Teams can deploy self-service and advanced messaging tools to deliver innovative, contactless services that surprise and delight while personalizing travel services through 360-degree views.

Whether you manage a global chain of hotels or a small, family-owned bed and breakfast, you deserve nothing less than a 5-star customer service software system. Discover how Zendesk can streamline hotel operations and help guest services deliver memorable experiences that keep travelers returning for years.

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