Artificial Intelligence has driven a number of small and big transformations in the industry. Among these industries, one can say that the healthcare and hospitality industry is among the biggest beneficiaries of digital transformation driven by artificial intelligence.
One area where AI has been rapidly adopted is customer service and experience. One of the startups aiming to deliver a unique experience in the hospitality industry is Please ask m. The startup based in Rotterdam is a hoteltech company building software as a service solutions for hotels.
Can you automate the MICE (Meetings, Incentives, Conferences, Exhibitions) bookings for the hospitality? This question is at the centre of the existence of Please ask m and its success could redefine an entire industry.
Solving challenges of the hospitality industry
Please ask m was founded in 2018 out of the dissatisfaction associated with the number of emails that hotels need to process regarding MICE bookings. As a hoteltech company, Please ask m says that the hospitality industry should focus on delivering happiness to people and not worry about obstacles like bookings.
The product that Please ask m has built is a complete digital product aimed to deliver an automated and personalised guest experience. It says these products are meant to increase efficiency, bookings, and turn-over. How does it aim to do that? Well, the answer is by using artificial intelligence.
In order to help the B2B hotel market, Please ask m has built an AI assistant called m, which helps with processing, centralising, and automating the business requests. Artificially intelligent chatbots have already redefined how we communicate or get customer service and Please ask m is trying to bring that same experience to MICE bookings.
What does m AI assistant do?
The core of m is based on the idea of gathering data and turning them into intelligence. In simple terms, data is the input and inference or business solution becomes the output. As an intelligent assistant, m is able to retrieve its data from various channels.
Once the data is retrieved, the assistant begins the process of centralising and managing all the incoming requests. These requests could have arrived via email, the webform, or any brokers. Once the data is gathered, m creates a new workflow in which a request is processed.
“The software takes a large part of the work of the employees’ hands and it is possible to work faster and more efficiently. Simple requests can even be processed fully automatically,” the startup says on its website.
Where m really stands out is its ability to pull up information from old reservations and reuse them to arrive at a new quotation or reservation as quickly as possible. The smart automation also makes m capable of recognising the content of an email request and reply automatically.
In a nutshell, Please ask m has built an intelligent assistant that is capable of bringing a wealth of information regarding a booking. It can also process requests and offer a quote faster with reservations often getting processed within 30 minutes. With m handling simple tasks, the hotel staff can focus on delivering their customers a personalised and memorable experience.
“[The] tool frees time to allow your team to give the customer greater attention, and even will highlight upsell opportunities,” the hoteltech startup explains.
What are the use cases of m?
Artificial Intelligence: Please ask m and its assistant m uses an AI software that is trained in recognising and sorting information. With the ability of AI to learn and evolve, the assistant gets better with every new request.
Processing emails: The AI assistant is also capable of reading emails and recognising all the relevant data. This allows the business to compose offers and process information faster than the manual labour of going through email, understanding the request, and then processing the query.
Booking engine: Whenever customers enter their data in the webform presented on the website of the hotel, m is intelligently able to process the information and is able to compose an offer instantly.
Channel manager: While m is an intelligent assistant, the ideal positioning of it would be as a channel manager. With its ability to centralise all the data and distribute it to all relevant channels or systems, m helps hotel businesses overview their external channels.
The ultimate assistant
With m, Please ask m is making a bold claim of delivering the ultimate assistant for the hospital sector. It has already roped in the likes of Postillion Hotels and Room Mate Bruno as its customer. The premise of m is very simple: it wants to take an industry stuck in old ways and change it to be better.
With AI transformation and digital transformation taking roots across a number of industries, it is not a far fetched claim. It may only have two hotel groups under its belt, however, it may not be long before it wins over many other hotel groups. The challenge for Please ask m will be to ensure its intelligent assistant is able to evolve and deliver for each and every client.