Opportunities of CRM in
Hotel Industry
Group No. 2
Kanika Rajat Jhingan
Rajat Jhingan
Introduction
CRM entails all aspects of interaction a company has with its customer,
whether it is sales or service related. It even uses technology to
streamline processes that impact customer loyalty, service delivery and
quality management.
Elements of CRM
– Guest recognition
– Data capture and maintenance
– Channel integration and consistency
– Ranking and discrimination
– Two-way personalized dialogs
Guest
Recognition
• A smiling face, recalling a preferred room type or a welcome back
greeting are all common recognition experiences in the hotel industry.
• Capturing, retaining and making effective use of expressed customer
preferences is the essence of guest recognition.
Data Capture and Maintenance
• In order to present information about a guest’s preferences to a guest
service agent, you first have to capture it and scrub it.
• A crucial consideration in capturing data is to make sure that you have
vehicles for data input from all plausible touch points with the guest.
• Scrubbing data means standardizing the address and other crucial fields to
ensure mailability.
• Standardized data is crucial to support effective house holding (the
process of matching similar records into a single customer master record
or into creating a new master).
Channel Integration and
Consistency
• Consumers prefer to conduct
transactions over the Internet.
• Web-based front-end systems are used.
• The key thing for the hotel company is
to ensure that the guest receives the same
recognition and differential treatment no
matter what channel they prefer to use to
interact with the firm.
• Another approach is to utilize best-of-
breed applications with robust interfaces.
Ranking and Discrimination
• Some customers are worth more to your business than others and you need
to invest more of your scarce resources in the most valuable customers,
and less in the others.
• Value every guest and deliver outstanding service to all of them
• CRM strategy needs to be a means of ranking your guests to identify the
most valuable and then servicing them differentially.
• By extension, you also want to identify low-value customers who are
potentially better customers, and offer them enhanced services as well.
Two-way Personalized Dialogs
• Pursues personalized communications with customers as individuals, content
specifically about the customer’s interests and preferences.
• Most of these communications include a tangible and specific call to action,
encouraging the customer to do something with the communication, thus
establishing a Two-Way Dialog.
• These dialogs serve both to reinforce the connection between the firm and the
customer and to provide opportunities for more information and sales with the
customer.
Need for Effective CRM
• Today’s Hotel Customers are Different - Customers care more about the
hotel that remembers them than the rewards. The frequent traveler are
more likely to return to a hotel that gets to know them.
• Get Connected to the Customers - By personalizing a customer's stay, a
hotel can ensure that customers will come back again and again simply by
remembering their favorite beverage, pillow or other preferred amenity.
• Retain the Customers - CRM implementations allow hotels to customize
the stay of loyal and valued customers as well as create special loyalty
rates for customers who continue to spend quality time and money with the
hotel
• CRM ensures that the hotel's technology is up to date and that a hotel can
track a customer's satisfaction by creating a close relationship to that
customer.
• Primary Focus for • Profitability for a
CRM Hotel with CRM
Focus on the customer's
Business customers personalized needs and not
on finance, marketing or
sales
Frequently Traveling
Creating loyal customers
Improving customer service
High-end Service
Improving customer
retention
Advantages of CRM
• Using CRM, a business can:-
– Provide better customer service
– Increase customer revenues
– Discover new customers
– Cross sell/Up Sell products more effectively
– Help sales staff close deals faster
– Make call centers more efficient
– Simplify marketing and sales processes
ITC MAURYA SHERATON DEFINES
CRM AS
• “Customer Relationship Management is a process of managing customer relations in an
organized way”. Aim at managing each “Moment Of Truth” that is experienced by the
customer.
• ‘Touch points’ – provide valuable inputs to the hotel by directly interacting with the
customer
• Inputs provided by the customers becomes information and can be used by various
processes within the hotel
• Following an unstructured form of CRM with a narrow focus of serving the customer well
• CRM process at ITC Maurya Sheraton has been divided in 2 steps:-
– Identification of all Customer Relationship management ‘vehicles’
– Integration of these Customer Relationship management ‘vehicles’
Identification of all Customer
Relationship management ‘vehicles’
• The first step is to create awareness among them towards the concept,
advantages and disadvantages of the function.
• Equip the Staff by providing training.
• At Maurya, they are trained to learn more about the guest and his background .
• Conversation may not be necessarily related to his stay at the hotel but these
informal conversations with the guest can help build an excellent rapport with
the guest which will lead the guest to know the employee by the name.
Integration of these Customer
Relationship management
‘vehicles’
• Field selling, Loyalty programs, Reservation systems, Web & Call
centers are the major sources of database development.
• The hotel has 35,000 members in its database.
• ITC Maurya regard this management of their database as an asset
because it enables a superior customer understanding.
DATA CAPTURE VEHICLES
• Maurya Sheraton has identified 5 such vehicles (from marketing point of
view) which are also the touch points for the hotel in the process of
managing its Customer Relationship. These vehicles are:-
– Field selling : When a sales group or a marketing executive of the
hotel makes a sales call to a corporate. It includes Prospecting which
means searching and seeking for new customers
– Loyalty Programs : These programs are designed to reward the loyal
guests of the hotel. Certain points attached to the number of rupees
spent by the guest. Higher the amount of the bill, the higher will be
the number of points attained by the guest.
– Distribution Points: A customer can simply make a call at the reservation
centre to make a booking with the hotel . Hotel see this Distribution point
as an opportunity to establish CRM as the respondents at the reservation
centre could turn a prospective customer into a ‘sale’ or could let go off
the opportunity to do so by not being polite enough or not giving out the
information as desired by the guest.
– Web : It is a computerized, interactive, multimedia system to import and/or
access information world wide
– Call Centers : ITC Maurya has a Call center dedicated to servicing the
loyalty programme members. Here the customers can call in and find out
about any information related to their membership. Whether query relates
to accumulation or redemption of points, it can be accessed through these
centers.
After Capturing Data from Various Vehicles
• Using the Database For
– Product and service improvement
– Developing special promotions
– Employing direct mail to promote campaigns .
• Database mining
– It is the process to distill the target customers groups out of the massive data files
typically found in hospitality operations.
– The systems analysis tools allow users to profile their most profitable customers,
analyze their buying habits, develop & assess the performance of targeted marketing
campaigns.
– It helps to focus the efforts and available resources into one direction which is most
profitable and out-base mining helps to eliminate the non-profitable customers and
hence reduces the costs and enhances the profits.
• Relationship Marketing :
– “knowing the customer and using that information to bond with them.”
• Complaint Handling :
– Pay attention to complaints
– Those people who do complaint and have their problem taken care of,
tend to be more loyal to the company than the people who were
satisfied in the first place.
– World-Class companies see complaints as opportunities to improve, to
impress customers and to turn complaining customers into loyal ones.
• Priority Marketing : Focuses on what’s important to the customer. What
is important to one customer however, may not be as important to another.
Thank
You
