You have launched an automatic reply on your website. In the first week everything looks fine: there are conversations, and nobody has complained. Then comes the question that follows anything new: does it really help, or is it just sitting there? The answer lies not in a feeling but in a few things you can check in one afternoon.
It is also important to be honest about one limitation. Nobody can promise you how many enquiries, reservations or overnight stays will come from the automatic reply. That is why there are no expected percentages below. There are monitoring habits that will show you whether things are moving in the right direction.
What “doing a good job” means
The automatic reply has three tasks. To answer the guest from the information you have approved. To refer them to the property's phone when there is no such information. And to collect the room request if the guest wants to book, so that the team can confirm it.
Doing a good job does not mean having the most conversations. A reception desk that gets twenty pointless messages is no better off than one that gets five clear ones. Doing a good job means the guest gets an answer and you save the repeated explanation, without losing people along the way.
What to look at in the Inbox
Conversations with the assistant are reviewed in the Inbox. You do not need to read every one. It is enough to look for three signs; the counting is manual, not an automatic statistic.
1. Conversations without an answer
These are the cases where the guest asked and the assistant could not help. Each such conversation is a note: “you are missing information here”. It might be parking, check-in time, whether pets are allowed, breakfast, the road in winter.
What to do: for every topic that appears two or three times, add a clear answer to the property's information. Then check whether the same question appears less often the following week.
2. Recurring topics
Sort the questions by topic, not by guest. If six out of ten conversations are about check-in time and parking, these are exactly the questions that used to reach reception by phone. If the assistant answers them accurately, it is doing the job it was set up to do.
There is also a second benefit here, which is often missed. Recurring topics show what guests cannot find on the website. If the most common question is “how much does it cost”, put a clear “from” price on the page. If it is “how to get there”, add a description of the route. The assistant is a mirror that shows you the gaps.
3. Referrals to the phone
When there is no information, the assistant does not make things up but refers the guest to the property's phone. This is the correct behaviour, not an error. There is no live chat with a person, so the phone is the place where the guest gets an answer from you.
Watch how often it happens and on which topics. A few referrals are fine, but only if the questions are genuinely unusual. Many referrals on the same topic mean that you have not provided the answer. Add it, and the referrals on that topic should decrease.
The 15-minute weekly review
You do not need a table of complex metrics. You need a habit. Once a week, for example on Monday morning:
- open the Inbox and look at the last seven days;
- mark the conversations without an answer and fill in the missing information;
- write down the three most common topics;
- count roughly how many referrals to the phone there were;
- check the new room requests for any that the team has not yet confirmed or declined.
The last point is important. A room request is not a reservation and does not hold a room until one of your staff confirms it, by default by phone. If requests sit unreviewed, the problem is not the assistant but who sees them, and when.
What you should not read as success or failure
Many owners look only at the number of conversations. It is misleading in both directions. More conversations can mean more interest, but also that the website explains nothing. Fewer conversations can mean that the website has become clear, but also that nobody sees the assistant.
Do not compare it with someone else's property either. Different places have different guests, seasons and questions. The only honest comparison is your property now with your property a month ago.
That is why a starting point helps. Before you switch on the automatic reply, write down how many times a week reception answered the same questions and how many enquiries were left without a reply in the evening. These numbers do not have to be exact. It is enough that they are honest. Then make the same record again after a month. If you did not do it before, start now and compare from here on.
When to stop and think
There are times when the signals are not good, and the honest thing is to admit it:
- guests often repeat their question because the answer was not clear;
- most conversations end with a referral to the phone, and the phone goes unanswered;
- the property's information is out of date, and prices and times have changed;
- room requests pile up and the team does not look at them.
In all these cases the first step is not to change the tool, but to go back to the information it relies on. The assistant's answers are as good as the information you have given it.
What to do this week
- Open the Inbox and read the last ten conversations.
- Write a list of the questions that had no answer.
- Add at least two answers to the property's information.
- Decide who reviews the room requests each day and at what time.
- Write down today's date and your starting numbers, so that you have something to compare with in a month.
For deeper work on the questions that keep coming up at reception, see the guide to reducing them; for the difference between an assistant and a static FAQ page, see the comparison.