The same questions, every single day

In an accommodation business most of the questions that reach the desk are always the same, and you could write them on one sheet at the start of the season. The trouble is not that they are hard. It is that they arrive one at a time, and each one interrupts something.

Which ones they are

Write them down for a week and the bulk falls into three groups. Times: breakfast, check-out, when the kitchen closes. House instructions, from the Wi-Fi to the heating to the parking. And the area: where to eat, how to get into town, what there is to see if it rains.

A fourth group, smaller but dearer, is the actual requests: an extra towel, a late check-out, a taxi for six in the morning.

What they cost

A single question takes a minute, which is why nobody counts it. The sum comes from the frequency: fifteen requests a day at two minutes each make half an hour, and across a season that turns into some fifty hours.

The number is not the point, though. The point is that those interruptions land at the worst moments, during check-in and during breakfast, when there is already a queue at the desk. And that some of them arrive when the desk is closed, so they are counted nowhere: the guest simply gets no answer.

What does not work

The printed in-room guide works for whoever opens it, and roughly nobody opens it. The sign on the door settles one question. The property's WhatsApp number moves the questions from the desk to the phone of whoever runs the place, often out of hours, and funnels them all to the same person.

What the three have in common is that none of them answers in the language of whoever is asking.

What it takes for them to stop

For a question not to reach the desk, three things have to hold at once, and if one is missing the question comes back.

1. The information is written down somewhere the guest can reach without asking permission, such as a QR code in the room that opens a page in the phone's browser
2. It is reachable at the hour the question occurs, which is often late in the evening
3. It is in the language of whoever is asking, with nobody having to sit down and translate

That is what a digital concierge does. The requests that remain, the ones that genuinely want a person, arrive on a board already written up, with the room and the time, and there is nothing left to copy out.

How you tell whether it is working

Not from the total number of conversations, which only tells you somebody scanned the QR code. The two numbers that matter are different: how many questions arrived outside service hours, which used to be lost, and which questions went unanswered. The second are the gaps in the property's own guide, and filling them is the best spent half hour of the month.

For the rest there are the benefits set out in full, and the how much you save page does the sum on your own figures instead of an example.