Most of the guest questions your team answers by hand are the same few, asked again and again. Octo, Octopus AI's AI teammate for hotels and serviced apartments, spots the guest questions it couldn't answer and puts the most-asked first. Training Octo is easy, and so is keeping it up to date!
Why do the same guest questions keep coming back?
The answer lives in someone's head, not anywhere a new starter or Octo can find it. On Friday at 16:12 a guest asks, "Any chance of getting in before 15:00?" Octo says it doesn't have an answer on early check-in yet and tells the guest it will ask the team to confirm.
The following week another guest asks the same thing. Your team answers it by hand again.
How does Octo find the questions it couldn't answer?
Octo keeps a note of every guest question it couldn't answer from what you've taught it, then groups the ones that ask the same thing.
Guests never phrase things the same way. "Early check-in?", "Can we arrive at 11?" and "Any chance of getting in before 15:00?" are one question. Octo groups them by meaning, even in different languages, and rewrites each group as one short question. Personal information is removed from every question, and anything you've already corrected stays off the list.
What does a week of unanswered questions look like?
Here's an illustrative week: 3 different questions, asked 7 times in all. "Can I check in early?" asked 4 times. "Is there parking for a van?" asked twice. "Do you take dogs?" asked once.
Without Octo, those 7 messages sit in separate conversations, and you'd only find them by reading every one. With Octo, you see them together, most-asked first, and you know which answer saves your team the most time.
How do you keep Octo's training up to date?
Octo sends you a regular report, as often as suits you, even daily, and you update its training from it at the click of a button.
- Read the list, most-asked first.
- Click the button that takes you straight to an FAQ sheet already filled with the questions.
- Type the answer to each question in your own words.
- Save. Octo uses your answers straight away.
Octo shows you where its knowledge has gaps, so it keeps getting smarter and stays up to date. It doesn't make things up. Check-in times, pet rules and parking are your policies, so they stay in your words.
Why is Octo easy to keep up to date?
Octo is easy to keep up to date because it tells you what it doesn't know. One of the biggest problems with AI tools is keeping them current: your business changes, the AI doesn't, and nobody notices until a guest gets an out-of-date answer.
Octo finds the questions it couldn't answer, ranks them and hands you an FAQ sheet with those questions already on it. You write each answer once, and Octo uses it straight away. That keeps Octo and your team aligned, so guests get the same answer from both, and your team stops answering the same question every week.
Related: Why guests don't book, and how to find out and When a guest needs a person.
