Hi @tobiaskoehler, 

Currently chats are not linked, however I agree It would be beneficial to link guest profiles with chats in order to improve the overall experience. I have come across a feature request for this and encourage you to support it by voting for it. This could increase the chances of the feature being implemented by the developers.
 

Thx @Mick for looking into that, I upvoted the feature request. 

Very good idea. It does make sense to have all the conversation in one place to gain in productivity while dealing with a guest. 

Do you have a lot of cross tool (email, chat, whatsapp?) communication with your guests? 

How often does it happen and what are all the tool you are currently using to communicate with guests? 

Thanks

Hi @coudert.mathias ,

thank you for looking into this. I will try to give you an overview of our case. 

We do have communication across various channels with our guests. Usually, they ask the same questions, e.g. directions, parking, breakfast times etc.. We are using the Dialogshift Chatbot to answer those requests so that our team is not preoccupied with answering the same questions over and over again. This is also the reason why we removed the link to the Mews chat in our emails to the guests and replaced it with a link to our chatbot (while forwarding the UID reservation number, so we still see who is writing and when they arrive with the help of the Dialogshift/ Mews integration). Here is an example for our Dortmund hotel chatbot “Mews Mailing landing page” for our guests (without UID): https://webchat.dialogshift.com/?clid=pro18a3&locale=en&channel=pwa-mailing

The most common channels besides email and telephone are:

• chatbot via website → covered by Dialogshift
• chatbot via link in emails → covered by Dialogshift
• chatbot via facebook messenger → covered by Dialogshift
• chatbot via Google → covered by Dialogshift
• chat via Mews

We currently have no WhatsApp Channel. 

Sidenote: It would be great to also have a connection between the Mews Chat and Dialogshift to be able to cover those FAQs by the bot. Idea would be to have chat messages from Mews forwarded to the Dialogshift bot. That would free us from about 70-75% of frequent requests. 

Here are some use cases why I think it would be helpful to have the chat with a guest linked in the reservation and/or the guests profile. Those cases make up around 25-30% of chats across all our hotels:

• upgrade/ upsell request, e.g. parking spot, breakfast (if not covered by our upselling tool Upsellguru)
• cancellation
• reservation change request
• complex requests, e.g. family requests two neighbouring rooms 
• dietary requests
• anniversary/ birthday/ etc hints

It is never good if the information is lost somewhere on the way. It might help to mitigate those human errors if there is a field similar to the notes field in the reservation that shows the recent chat history with the guest. So that if somebody forgot to add the breakfast product it at least is mentioned in the chat history and can be discovered latest during check in. 

Let me know if you need more input.

Kind regards

Tobias

PS: Currently having too much time and sitting on a delayed train, so here are some more ideas, that are very hypothetical but were fun to think about: 
If we think this further and assume there is a chat integration between Mews and Dialogshift and the chat history field in the reservation, it would come in handy if the chat history within the reservation only shows the messages that have not been answered by the bot. 
E.g.: Guest asks about check in times and this has been answered by the bot, we do not need to see this. However, guest asks to bring his dog and the bot forwards this message to the team to answer it, this should be displayed within the chat history in the reservation. 
And one last idea: Maybe you can make use of an AI like ChatGPT or similar to analyze and summarize the exchange between guest and the team so that we do not have to read the full dialog and only see the summary in the notes , e.g. “guest brings dog”. Of course the cherry on the cake would be to have a task created that asks to add the respective product or even have this done automatically. 


 

@coudert.mathias here is a cool feature from intercom I stumbled across today that would benefit the idea I mentioned above: 

especially the conversation summary part of it. Maybe my idea is not too far away

My GM Is adamant about not having a chatbot.

Is there a way to get a chat onto the homepage that ties in with a guest profile that is human driven?

Thanks

E

You could solve this with different partners that offer a chat and are integrated with Mews. The integration is necessary to be able to access reservation & guest data and display it in the tool, e.g. to show the next stay etc. From my experience, Bookboost does a great job with using the guests email or phone number to check for a guest profile and display the guest’s information next to the chat (incl. next stays and link into mews). However, I am not sure if they already have something in place that asks the guest for their email during start of the chat to be able to search for this ID. Another supplier is Dialogshift who should be able to do something similar. Both supplier have chatbots but they can be switched of and chats will go directly to the dedicated person.

@tobiaskoehler : Just on the fly, you could potentially build something like you imagine with the new Message API endpoint on the Connector API:

1) Use case 1: Not sure the Dialogshift Bot realizes when it cannot answer a question and needs human help. But in that case, Dialogshift could open a communication with the Mews chat, potentially route the message from the guest directly to Mews:

https://mews-systems.gitbook.io/connector-api/operations/messagethreads

2) Use case 2: Dialogshift could open a communication over the Mews chat, where you could teach the bot (based on messages) what it does not know yet / what guests are asking you at the front office.

The available functions in the API are that a partner can open a message thread with the Mews chat, can send messages in that thread and can also look up the thread. Very important is that the thread needs to be opened by the partner - for privacy reasons, you cannot access threads which you have not started yourself (which makes sense ).

@tobiaskoehler thank you for the info.

thank you for the info.

We’ve been chatting it over (ha!) I think we may have found middle ground.

do you think the following is a bad idea?

As long as the chat, bot identifies itself directly as a chat, bot and gives the guest a choice to use it, or send a message to a human. That might work for us.

i’m hoping that is not too difficult a task?

thanks  

Hi @tobiaskoehler thank you for your input.

I have spoken again with the GM and we are going to explore a chatbot.

So far I’ve spoken to DialogueShift and https://www.quicktext.im/

Any others recommended?

Thank you!

Ethan

Talk to Runnr! Its whatsapp based - chatGPT connected and all within the whatsapp account for your guest. Its is startup phase however already connected to MEWS allowing the bot to eg book breakfast if not booked yet etc. www.runnr.ai