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Saved close to 7,000 working hours to the hotel employees
Casa di Fiore SPA & Medical is a 5-star hotel situated at the beach of the Northern Black Sea coast, in the heart of the pretty resort village Kranevo. It has 184 rooms and 4 apartments, warm mineral indoor and outdoor swimming pools, SPA and medical facilities, an amazing garden, beauty salons, fitness, and many other hotel services that help the guests to relax and feel like they are at a fairy tale place for their holiday.
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The size and the type of the property and the variety of services mean a lot of routine questions and inquiries by the hotel guests’ day and night, before, during, and after their stay. The idea of the hotel team was to digitize communication with customers and, together with other services, respond to international trends and customer expectations. The hotel AI chatbot was a perfect match for the idea and the desired results. The hotel wanted also to solve such problems as lack of employees and high turnover during and after the pandemic with the implementation of a digital employee that is part of the hotel family.
The creation of the hotel’s AI chatbot Miss Fiore and its implementation on the hotel’s website was part of the initiative and the necessary automation. It had to be planned properly to work for the benefit of the business, hotel staff and guests. Miss Fiore was created on the Umni.bg platform and started working immediately after its implementation with the conversational AI module provided by Umni.bg with over 760+ hotel topics and 10,400+ customer questions, which allowed the chatbot to answer questions from a day 1. The team’s first expectations were that the technology would be difficult to use and would take too much time for employees to implement. This quickly changed when the Marketing Department team involved in the creation and development of the chatbot saw how easy the Umni.bg platform was to use, without the need for technical knowledge and skills. Only a few lines of code need to be implemented on the site.
After implementing the hotel AI chatbot with its main functionalities activated: predefined information and promotion sections created and connected, inquiry forms built and answers provided to the pre-trained conversational AI module, came the great results.
For its first year of implementation (2022), Miss Fiore achieved:
- 83,543 users assisted in Bulgarian and English. Even if every customer took only 1 minute to be assisted by the chatbot, for 12 months Miss Fiore has chatted with guests almost 1,390 hours. This is the work of one person on duty every month! Industry statistics show that a conversation with a hotel guest takes on average 6 to 12 minutes. Miss Fiore also took the night shifts, the weekend job, and the duties on holidays.
- Over 545,000 interactions in the chatbot including searching, scrolling, clicking, and chatting in just 12 months
- Saved close to 7,000 working hours to the hotel employees (the work of 3 to 4 people on duty every month)
- 62% of the communication was via mobile phone which proves that customers use more their phones for self-service from any place they are
- 39% of the night chatting (up to 45%) – many guests searched for information outside of regular business hours
- 32% of requests were submitted at night. Many people made their decision for booking a room or service or needed assistance with certain questions before going to bed.
- On its busiest month of the year, Miss Fiore had close to 61,000 interactions by users with over 4,000 customer interactions on its busiest day. Looks like guests love to interact with the smiley assistant!
- Among the top 5 most frequently asked questions were questions about room availability and prices which justifies the need and the implementation of integration with the hotel reservation system for direct reservations through the chatbot.
Choosing a name for the hotel AI chatbot and creating an avatar were part of the brand’s marketing communication to attract more interest to the AI chatbot. The idea behind this was to create the character of Miss Fiore as a sweet and fairy-tale character – the hostess of the house, who is always online to help guests with answers to their questions and guide them to make a direct reservation for service through the chatbot. An interesting point is that after creating the chatbot and Miss Fiore as a character, the hotel was able to find a young woman to model for the hotel’s photo shoot that looked like the Miss Fiore chatbot. In this way, the hotel has achieved continuity in its visual presentation, and it is easier for guests to imagine in the face of Miss Fiore the image of the beautiful girl who answers the questions, and as if the communication is with a real person who is present in all the photos on the hotel website.
Miss Fiore was also part of the Digitalk&A1 Awards by Capital competition for the most successful Bulgarian projects for new technologies implemented by the business. A video ad with the chatbot character on how customers can use it was also created to be promoted to customers online. Creating a story about Miss Fiore and featuring the AI chatbot as the subject of an article on the hotel’s website was another way to promote the hotel’s AI chatbot and make it a popular assistant among hotel guests.
As a result of customer demand, the chatbot also added integration with the hotel reservation system, WebHotelier, to make booking a room through the chatbot even faster and easier. Implementing the integration allowed hotel guests to book the desired room for their stay through the chatbot in a conversational manner, allowing the hotel to open up another automated sales channel. The integration is triggered by questions in the chatbot about room availability, price for a certain time period, seasonality, number of people staying, and other types of guest questions on the topic.
The innovations of Casa Di Fiore Spa & Medical did not stop there. For the Christmas and New Year holidays, the hotel released 2 holiday sticker packs on Viber with different images of the Miss Fiore character and greetings.
As her 1st birthday approaches, Miss Fiore has also acquired a voice (speech recognition). The hotel AI chatbot now provides voice assistance in Bulgarian and English for chatting with customers via voice messages – for easier and faster, and also more interactive communication.
Business feedback
“We planned to use a chatbot already during the construction of the hotel. For over a year now, Miss Fiore has been helping customers find answers to their questions or make a reservation instantly at any time of the day. Thanks to Ms. Fiore’s unexpected and great accomplishments, she is now an indispensable member of our team.”
Iglika Todorova
Owner of Hotel Casa di Fiore SPA & Medical