One of the annoying things about business travel is that you tend to need things in your hotel room at the worst time. More shampoo when you’re still in your pajamas. A mending kit to repair a button in time for your dinner meeting.
The hotel staff, while generally helpful and accommodating, has other things to do. So you wait. It’s not the best customer experience, but if you travel often, you learn to live with it.
Now, though, a handful of hotels are using robots to ease this pain point. They’re hoping to make the experience better for both guests and employees. But taken too far, a robot threatens to destroy the thing that makes a small hotel appealing in the first place.
The Robot Experience
At the West Wing Boutique Hotel in Tampa, Florida, a three foot tall, podium-sized robot named Wes roams the halls, bringing guests things they’ve requested and surprising them with free snacks and drinks. Wes has a compartment big enough to hold a couple of towels, and an array of cute sounds and blinking lights that endear him to guests the way Star Wars fans fawn over R2-D2 and BB-8.
West Wing’s director of revenue says that he was looking for technology that would be unique and memorable for guests but also helpful to hotel staff. Finding a memorable solution is a good impulse: our research has shown that positive memories are the number one driver of long-term value for customers. You can read more about that in Prof. Ryan Hamilton’s and my latest book, The Intuitive Customer.
There’s One Thing Robots Can’t Do
There are, however, limitations to what robots can do. When Wes shows up with a can of Coke, meant to surprise and delight you, he can’t know that you’re on a diet, or diabetic, or really detest Coke and would prefer a Fanta. A human might not know these things either but a human could see the look on your face, realize something was amiss, and try to correct the situation. Artificial intelligence can do many things, but it can’t read body language or understand why people respond as they do.
In England, we had a regular milk delivery for many years. The milkman came to the house with milk, and once a week he came by for payment. I wanted to do away with the delivery and buy our milk at the shop because it was cheaper but Lorraine wouldn’t hear of it. She liked the milkman and she enjoyed their chats when he came round for payment. But then our milkman left the company and we got a new one.
The new milkman had a more efficient payment-collecting process that certainly didn’t involve chatting with Lorraine. He’d simply leave an envelope, and we’d put a check in it for him to pick up. Without the personal touch, we soon dropped the milk delivery and began buying our milk at the shop like everyone else. The personal touch of the experience had gone, been lost and missed.
People who stay at boutique hotels often choose them because of the service and personal interactions they provide. Guests might enjoy saying hello to the desk clerk each day, getting restaurant recommendations or just seeing a friendly face delivering room service. When you depend on robots for tasks that used to be performed by humans, you risk losing those personal touches in favor of the more impersonal style of large chains. Rather than increase value and customer loyalty, a robot has the potential to destroy the things that make a business special in the first place.
As a Star Trek fan, I love the idea of a robot bringing me snacks. But they should be used with caution. Wes’s blinking lights and bubbly sounds may be endearing, but they can’t replicate the warmth and compassion of a real human being.
What do you think? Can robots help the hotel guest experience?
To learn more about providing positive memories for your customers read our new book The Intuitive Customer: 7 imperatives for moving your Customer Experience to the next level.
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Colin Shaw is the founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy, one of the world’s leading Customer experience consultancy & training organizations. Colin is an international author of six bestselling books and an engaging keynote speaker.
Follow Colin Shaw on Twitter @ColinShaw_CX