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“Guest interaction has now been replaced by AI”
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Monday, 18 March, 2024, 08 : 00 AM [IST]
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 Ecobillz, an innovative SaaS-based real-time digitisation platform that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to digitise, collect, aggregate data and build complex back-office automation systems, is currently focused on the hospitality business.The platform aims to build the technology that can read, accumulate documents and store data in real-time, thus leading to an efficient digitised document management system. As the platform focuses on industry wise intervention to replace paper-based transactions with customers, the artificial intelligence embedded helps to crunch the data, thus generating valuable insights for the respective businesses.
Dr Ameet Patil, founder & CEO at Ecobillz Pvt. Ltd, shared his views on the hospitality industry, latest technology, digitised document management systems, sustainability and more, in an email interview with Kimberley Almeida. Excerpts:
The hospitality industry has changed over the past few years. Comment.
Globally, the hospitality segment first evolves in the West and then the technology moves to India and Southeast Asia.Over the last decade, we have observed that in Western countries, the traditional mode of hospitality has drastically changed in the hospitality business. In other words, elements like guest interaction and person-to-person interface have now been replaced by AI bots, automated kiosk systems. Thus, instead of going to the reception, customers can walk into a kiosk for automatic check-in and go to their room directly. These features have become the norm in the Western countries.
Recently, this trend has been adopted in India and has witnessed a major impetus in the post-Covid era to combat the issue of high-cost human resources. Currently, the industry is experimenting with a hybrid mode by integrating AI technology along with hospitality staff to heighten the user experience of its customers. With the changing dynamics of the industry, the technology is expected to witness several more transitions in the future.
Why is AI of utmost importance to the hospitality industry?
Customers today demand the best possible hospitality experience. This is only possible if the staff is well-versed with its customer base. Ecobillz’s AI-enabled application plays a major role in churning out all the details about the customers from their previous visits assisting the staff in instantly creating a customised package with their preferred room location, food and beverage choices and preferences, etc. This technology also ensures accurate billing, availing discounts, upgrading customers to premium memberships among various other factors. This in itself heightens the hospitality experience. Customers’ feedback is also registered for future use to help the hotel staff serve accordingly despite changes in the workforce. Our data and analytics-based technology has been integrated into every major hotel chain across the country to heighten the experience. AI is also being implemented in the hospitality industry for payment reconciliation, automated cleaning services and voice-driven smart bots and smart security services.
Give us a brief description about the company.
Ecobillz, established in 2016, is an innovative AI-led digitisation B2B SaaS platform that uses AI/ML to capture, read and accumulate/collect documents and data in real-time for use as a document management system, advanced business process automation and to churn the data for generating valuable insights of your business. It was built to eliminate the use of paper by providing innovative real-time digital solutions and automating backend operations.
Its main advantage is that it requires no change in the existing software or process of the organisation. Hotels therefore can quickly adopt Ecobillz without making any changes to their existing systems and processes.
Over the years, we have forayed into multiple domains such as hospitality, Quick Service Restaurants (QSR), retail, etc. Today, Ecobillz is being used in more than 200+ premium luxury hotels all across India and abroad. Ecobillz.com - a Nasscom 10,000 Startup and also part of 500 Startups was instituted with a strong mission to help large organisations adopt advanced digitisation using AI in order to increase productivity with process automation and data mining with the aim to save trees and time—thus transforming business to become more responsible.
How does the company plan on building an efficient digitised document management system?
Today, the hospitality industry is aggressively adopting more sustainable ways of operation. Digitisation allows hotels to eliminate the need for paper, addressing the challenge of paper wastage and storage-related problems of documenting paper-based invoices and documents. With digitisation, all digital documents are safely and securely stored in the cloud or data-centre where they can be easily accessed in real-time.These digital documents not only get stored but also get categorised and analysed to predict transaction frauds, income related audits, guest’s consumption patterns, profiling, preferences, etc. to further enhance guest experience.
Secondly, Covid has shown that businesses should now be operational from anywhere remotely. Digitisation helps with remote access making remote work seamless and secure. Ecobillz solutions for digitised document management software can be easily integrated in any hotel software within 15 minutes with zero change in the system.
What are the challenges faced by the company in this competitive space?
We are a green company and our main vision is to eliminate the use of paper. But customers do not necessarily reciprocate the same vision. Since paper billing systems have been prevalent for time immemorial, making such a switch, that too at an extensive level, was initially hard for customers to accept. Businesses focus on quick returns, rather than investing money in an area that makes them green.
Hence, our first big challenge was to build this business from one hotel to 200+hotels by convincing the customers that it is not just paper, it is something beyond that. In a hotel with 100 rooms, the amount of paper needed for bills and documentation is enormous. A digitised system that eliminates the need for paper will eventually save a huge amount of money on paper and the maintenance of printers every year.
Furthermore, the Indian law requires the hospitality industry to maintain the records of every data for at least six years for verification purposes. This accounts for a huge amount of paperwork to be stored in storage facilities which is also a huge investment. Adding to that, searching for relevant documents in time of need is strenuous work. Digitisation eliminates this process by providing the required information at the click of a button. Lastly, the AI-enabled technology not only stores documents but also churns that data to build analytics, which would eventually help hotels to understand and serve their customers better. It’s a win-win situation that we have created.
How has the company improved and adapted to the changing trends in the Indian market?
Covid has changed customer behaviour wherein customers are now less likely to approach the front desk, stand in queues and make personal contacts. This is a phenomenal trend happening across the globe where people want to have everything contactless. Ecobillz has been ahead of its time to come up with a contactless solution that helps customers make direct online payments and receive online bills without the need for direct contact with the hotel staff. This contactless module was extremely helpful to facilitate contactless check-in and check-out in that period as many patients were stationed in hotels for quarantine.
Moving forward, by 2022, the Government of India introduced a law for businesses with over Rs 5 crore turnovers to present E-Invoices with QR codes to their B2B customers. At that time, none of the software available supported this requirement. We swiftly came up with an E-Invoice module that can be integrated with any software and can plug in with any system to give invoices with QR code. Today, more than 150 hotels in India are using this solution. As a company, we used these adversities to quickly adapt to the situations and leverage our solutions to real-time requirements.
What are the company’s long-term goals for sustainability?
The entire concept of our company is to create a conduit for businesses to use digitised solutions and automation to make a sustainable impact. The digital platform completely eliminates the use of paper and provides real-time automation of backend operations.
In addition, we are working towards connecting businesses with carbon indexing. Many European countries provide carbon credits to organisations that take positive steps to reduce carbon emissions. We are working on a sustainability parameter or a formula that our customers can use to enhance and measure their carbon quotient on a daily basis and increase their green index.
Our long-term plan is to augment the technology to enable the digitisation of every aspect of the business.
Tell us about the company’s expansion plans in Africa, Middle East, and South East Asia.
We have vehemently started our expansion in international markets and are working on different automated kiosk systems that are AI-enabled while integrating the human element. With these systems, we are expanding in Europe, Africa, Southeast Asia and Middle East areas enabling us to cater to bigger markets that will help us meet our goal to enhance sustainability across the globe. As we expand our footprints to new markets, we customise our products to meet the demands of the specific regions.We are also leveraging and reinventing our existing product portfolio to suit the future needs of the Indian market.
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