1. Change of philosophy
First of all, if you are working in sales or marketing within the hotel you must bring about a change of philosophy. Working with a CRM in the hotel means betting on having a direct relationship with your end customers, the guests.
It is not only the integration of a technological tool. It means changing the way of doing business with the aim of creating customer-centric business models, guest centric. Customers are the most valuable business asset for hotels even if their value is not reflected in the balance sheets. Traditional non-CRM oriented management focuses on products and services but may misguide their strategies towards the real target: the customer.
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2. SMART objectives
SMART objectives determine priorities for each team, help make company results measurable, and serve as a guide for company growth. The SMART characteristic was born from the acronym that refers to the 5 basic characteristics that each objective must have to be considered a smart objective. So that you can see them clearly we list them by associating them with an example:
- Sspecific: Increase the registrations of our loyalty program by 30%.
- Measurable (measurable): 30% (from 5,000 to 6,500).
- Attainable (achievable): doubling personalized emails.
- Relevant (relevant): to prepare for the launch of new program benefits.
- Timely (on time): within 35 days.
3. Data integration
Information and data of interest, guest data, in hotels is widely distributed in various systems and locations that are known as data silos. Before starting with a CRM tool you must evaluate these silos in terms of quantity and quality, always giving priority to the latter attribute.
Once the interesting systems and databases have been detected, a more technological process is needed, since it is necessary to study the integration of this information with the CRM system for the hotel to go from having silos to a single warehouse. This way, with all the data in one place, you will be able to apply advanced context and segmentation to all your customer records.
Integrations are technical processes so make sure that the system you want to connect is connectable (usually because it has an API or web services for that purpose) and, at the same time, that the CRM to be implemented can connect with those other data sources.
A practical example of integration applicable to most hotels would be to propose a connection with the PMS to get all new records or update existing ones in the CRM every time a check-in occurs.
4. Buyer Personas and Buyer Journey
The buyer persona exercise consists of giving a name, characteristics and personality to what was previously simply a customer typology. Thanks to buyer personas, we can be clearer about how to connect with this type of customer and get them to convert. It allows us to concretize the abstract, allowing the whole team to know at a glance the needs and type of content to be generated for each type of customer.
On the other hand, the buyer journey is the active search process carried out by a potential consumer until it becomes a sale of our product or service.
So knowing your customer (buyer persona) and the phases through which the user goes through before completing the buying process (buyer journey) is essential in order to prepare the subsequent deployment of your CRM project, because together with the objectives it will be the guide that will mark the relationship strategy with your customers.
5. Legal aspects
In the CRM project for your hotel you should consider migrating the information to the cloud (i.e. a digital environment), you should also review at a legal level all the processes of information collection and data processing. The first thing to take into account when hiring a CRM service is that it complies with the regulations on personal data protection.
