What exactly does the travel startup DialogShift do?

An interview with Olga Heuser (CEO and co-founder of DialogShift)

Can you briefly describe DialogShift in one sentence?

DialogShift simplifies and enhances communication between hotels and guests with comprehensive, AI-powered chat solutions.

How long has DialogShift been around, and who is your target audience?

Our guest chat platform for the hospitality industry has been available for just over a year. Our target audience includes hotels, hostels, and providers of serviced apartments of all sizes. At its core, the platform is designed to facilitate efficient and straightforward communication with guests. The goal is to make ourselves accessible through relevant channels and to provide easy access to information and services.

In your opinion, what sets DialogShift apart? What makes you stand out from the competition?

DialogShift differs from other hotel chatbot providers in two key ways: our conversational experience and our technology.

We place a high priority on the conversational experience provided by our virtual assistants. Our virtual assistants don’t just provide answers; they can engage in charming conversations, highlight the hotel’s unique features, provide information about services, or offer recommendations. As a result, engagement and conversion rates for our chats are very high. In some hotels, the IBE conversion rate exceeds 30%—meaning that one in three users of the chat on the hotel website initiates a booking directly from the chat and completes it in the hotel’s booking engine.

Our Technology: We have a comprehensive conversational AI platform for chat solutions that provides us with a high degree of flexibility and enables us to deliver customized solutions for our clients. Our virtual assistants can be integrated into various touchpoints to facilitate live or automated customer interactions: on websites, in apps, digital guest folders, or messaging platforms such as Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp. They are already trained with industry-specific dialogues and ready for immediate use. And the beauty of AI is that it never stops learning and keeps getting better.

What inspired you to start DialogShift?

My co-founder Stefan and I traveled a lot before founding DialogShift and spent a great deal of time in hotels—Stefan as a management consultant and I as a staff member at the German Bundestag. At some point, we began to wonder why communication channels in hotels were sometimes so outdated. My generation doesn’t like to make phone calls, and in most cases, we don’t wait hours or even days for an email reply. Communication culture has changed in recent years: communication has become fast, digital, and immediate.

At DialogShift, we develop products for hotel guests like us: for everyone who doesn’t want to search for information on websites. For everyone who would rather book online than make a phone call. For everyone whose inbox is overflowing with over 1,000 unread emails because important communication no longer happens via email. For everyone who loves things that are simple, fast, and intuitive.

Was war der beste Ratschlag, den Ihr fürs Gründen bekommen habt?

We choose not to rely on venture capital funding, but to remain independent. We are doers; we want to develop great products that create value for our customers. We aren’t driven by money or the big exit—instead, our goals are sustainable entrepreneurship, satisfied customers, and freedom.

Wie finanziert ihr euch?

In terms of revenue, we are growing organically.

How are you handling working from home during the pandemic?

Since part of our team works remotely, this wasn’t a big adjustment for us. We communicate almost exclusively through Slack and other project management tools anyway. For me personally, working from home was a big challenge because our children were home too. I’m very glad to be back in the office.

In these times of the coronavirus, what is the biggest challenge for you besides the drop in sales?

We responded to the crisis with decisive action and developed a product for hospitals right from the start. Inaction and stagnation were not options for us. And since our product is industry-agnostic, it quickly became clear to us that we could deploy it where it would be most helpful and provide relief right now—in hospitals.

When we read about how overwhelmed the hotlines were with questions about the novel coronavirus, we quickly developed a chatbot for COVID-19 communication and made it available to the Berlin-based hospital group Vivantes. Since mid-March, the chatbot has been answering questions in many languages about symptoms and testing, using an expert system to assess patients’ conditions, and providing targeted recommendations for action.

We had planned to tackle the healthcare sector by the end of the year anyway. We now have several German hospital operators as clients. It was challenging, but we made the best of the crisis, true to the motto: “Turn roadblocks into speed bombs” (a quote from my favorite podcast, “Startups for the Rest of Us”).

In your opinion, how do you think the tourism industry—including travel and booking habits—will change after the pandemic?

I think it will take at least two years for the industry to recover. Following previous global crises—such as the Gulf War, 9/11, and the global financial crisis—the hotel industry recovered to its previous growth levels within two years in each case. Even if a vaccine is available by early next year, the coming recession will affect travel and booking behavior in the medium term. Business travel will suffer in the long term and may not reach pre-COVID levels for a very, very long time. Many companies have learned that video calls can replace business travel.