Bringing on a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to manage sales and operations is a very important business decision that can significantly impact bookings, guest satisfaction, and even the employee experience. Delivering exceptional service is vital in hospitality, which is why it’s critical that you make the right choice for your business. But with so many options, that decision can be challenging—and maybe even a bit overwhelming.
To narrow down your choices, first, consider your business needs. Hotels and event venues need to streamline tasks and ensure cross-functional teams—that may be spread across multiple properties—can work together effectively. Hotels and venues also need to create a frictionless experience for customers and guests. Hospitality CRMs built specifically for hoteliers and venues offer customized features that support their workflows. If you’re hoping to streamline and automate your hotel’s operations and deliver a seamless experience for guests, read on to understand the top five key business benefits to look for in a hospitality CRM.
The Top 5 Key Business Benefits to Look For In a Hospitality CRM
1. Enabling collaboration among cross-functional teams
A hospitality CRM enables all staff to have access to the same information, so they can collaborate to close business, serve guests, and manage groups and events. When everyone is working with the same information, teams are empowered to deliver consistent services and improve the guest experience. While delivering great service may seem achievable for most brands, not many are actually successful. According to Accenture, “80% of brands think they deliver a superior customer experience but only 8% of their customers agree.” Streamline communication among employees with real-time messaging, making it easy for teams to collaborate and contribute to the same objectives.
2. Understanding customer behavior and needs
Hotels generate a lot of data, but that information is only useful if you have a solution that presents information in a digestible format. A hospitality CRM with data management at its core will show you the relevant information you need on one dashboard to help you better serve your guests and corporate customers. Advanced predictive analytics can help you see patterns in guest behavior, as well as, track the performance of each employee, your team, and the overall hotel. Identify issues quickly and have the agility to adjust pricing and offers on the fly.
3. Enhancing the customer journey with automation and customization
A hospitality CRM helps employees save time, improving their ability to focus on serving their customers. How? By using automation to support mundane and repetitive tasks and to streamline their marketing campaigns, operations, and communication. Modern solutions will provide hints on what to do next, and the context on how to take action efficiently. According to Deloitte, “A new generation of CRM goes one step further…Automatically generated insights help you understand your customers better, even predicting how they will feel and act so that you can prepare the right outreach.”
Tailor the platform according to your hotel’s specific needs with custom fields and flexible validation rules enabling automation of activities such as account traces, task reminders, and emails relevant to the customer’s booking stage.
4. Improving sales efficiency and effectiveness
Supporting the sales function is an important benefit that a hospitality CRM can offer. Automatically assign accounts to the relevant sales manager based on custom rules, making it easy to manage multiple territories. Get accurate forecasting reports so your sales team can identify areas of improvement and make the changes needed to hit their targets. Using forecasting data also enables you to delegate resources to work as efficiently as possible, resulting in a better return on your investment.
Empower sales teams to be more agile and take advantage of opportunities as (and even before) they arise. Monitor your team’s productivity in real-time, and compare actuals vs. goals for individual sales managers and overall team performance.
5. Integrating systems for a single source of truth
It’s a headache to manage information in multiple locations, especially in manual spreadsheets. To avoid having disparate data sources, hoteliers need a fully centralized solution. By connecting your property management system (PMS), point of sale system (POS), and other applications, you have a single database to track all your data. The user interface makes it easy to design custom reporting dashboards and delivers business intelligence to empower teams to make data-driven decisions quickly.
Achieving operational excellence
Carefully choosing a CRM that is right for you will be a key factor in the success of your business. For the hospitality industry, it’s critically important to have the right tools to help employees do what they do best: Serving customers. A hospitality CRM that addresses the unique needs of hoteliers is what your brand needs to bring cross-functional teams together and effectively compete in today’s market.
Request a demo today
Looking for a solution that delivers all the business benefits described above? You are in the right place. Founded by hoteliers with years of experience in the hospitality industry, Thynk provides all these benefits and more. Request a demo today to learn how Thynk can support your brand.
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