The most important decision to make as a hotelier is technology salespeople. The particular features of the hotel Group CRM Software will dictate the choice of a CRM software solution. While many great technology companies are serving the hospitality industry, you need to ask the correct questions and do your due persistence to choose the best sellers for your hotel.
Finding the best hotel CRM vendor is essential because guest data is one of your hotel’s most valuable assets. The right CRM will always provide you with an up-to-date blueprint of your customer base so that you can market more effectively. In an industry where intermediaries like OTAs take a significant cut of profits, managing your hotel visitor data well can help you surpasses revenue goals, even with today’s small marketing budgets.
- Specifying the purpose of the CRM tool
As defined in the previous article, the primary function of a CRM system is to manage the interactions between your establishment and its customers. The purpose of customer relationship management varies depending on the department or office within the company and can take many different forms.
Positive Conversations with Challenging Customers
You can have many different objectives and focus on other solutions, each highly specialized for its specific purpose.
- Built for hotels
Creating a CRM for hotels is different from creating a CRM for an insurance business. First, it will help find a CRM partner who understands the unique needs of hotels and how they are structured and operated. For example, your property’s marketing manager might be sending out property-level promotions. But, the brand or management group will also want access to your guest database for brand-level campaigns. Or, the brand may have goals around database development that you need to accomplish. Providing access to the correct data and reports to the right people in hotels is incredibly important, especially given today’s strict data privacy regulations.
Another reason you might want to look into hotel-specific CRMs is attribution reporting. Effectively attributing earnings to marketing can be extremely difficult. Using standard tools can blind you to determining the success of your email marketing efforts. Hospitality-specific solutions change this by adding email with guest reservations to attribute income correctly.
- Integration Specialists
It should not surprise that most email solutions cannot integrate with your PMS. This is because hospitality software tends to be closed and isolated from the tech world. But without accessing the guest database, PMS areas, or guest travel, it is impossible to create automated and smart-segmented campaigns relevant to hospitality. Plus, without the ability to suppress recipients, such as future guests who will stay, you could end up creating some customer service headaches for yourself and your team.
Furthermore, proper segmentation is crucial for hotels to implement successful email campaigns. Without access to guest profiles and reservation data, it is impossible to connect with guests on a personal level. Hospitality-specific solutions empower hotel marketers to transform how they actively engage with guests.
Today, technology platforms need to function together. This is mainly true in the hospitality industry as various systems collect data throughout the guest journey. For CRM to be effective, it must integrate with PMS and ingest all available data. The more information your CRM can consume, the better your segmentation and personalization will be.
- Which is the best CRM system for a hotel?
There is no definite answer. The particular features of the hotel will dictate the choice of a CRM software solution:
Hotels should be able to perform the following functions at least:
- Database segmentation
- Monitoring interactions with customers
- Managing customer satisfaction
- Identifying customer dissatisfaction during a stay
- A reward system for loyal/priority customers
- Online marketing campaigns
- The ability to promote/recommend services at different points or phases of the customer profile
- Upgrading your hospitality facilities
- Don’t get scrambled up
For the most part, PMS and channel managers are practical tools for accomplishing their primary objectives. However, they are not considered CRM because they are not a customer relationship tool. Instead, they aim to manage your operations and sales. This means they are designed specifically for these two areas – which are already quite complex.
However, recording your reservation allows you to create a database that can then be segmented. It should integrate this completely reliable data into your CRM in real-time. Therefore, your PMS and channel manager must be able to connect to your CRM to share this information.
The CRM system will virtually remain your most up-to-date and reliable customer database.
- Culmination
The CRM system should be an easy-to-use tool and fit the job. Otherwise, it will not comply and cause problems. So, without going into too much detail, the question we need to ask is:
Will implementing this CRM system save time?
If the answer is yes, it’s probably the right tool. This is because saving time will free up valuable time dedicated to each customer.
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