While many industries have found success with robust customer relationship management (CRM) programs and solutions to back it up, it's the highly customer-centric industries for whom CRM is so critical: those industries that live or die by individual customer interactions. (While it's great to have a customer support philosophy on paper, just one real-life interaction handled incorrectly, in these days of social media, can have a big negative bump for these industries.)
Nowhere is CRM more critical than the hospitality industry, including hotel business. The importance of establishing and maintaining good customer relationship management (CRM) should be obvious to all hoteliers wanting to expand their business and increase revenue, wrote Hotel Industry UK this week .
Happily, many CRM solutions providers understand the importance of what they have to offer to the hospitality industry. They have added hotel must-have cloud business features as well coordination with mobile devices and 360 customer data views.
Since hotel customers heavily use alternative, mobile media channels such as SMS, mobile e-mail and chat, they expect that the hotels they stay in will have the ability to communicate in these channels as well. What's critical is that these media channels not be “siloed,” or lack centralized coordination between them.
Cloud-based CRM solutions from companies such as Aplicor ensure that these media channels are thoroughly integrated for a 360-degree view of the customer relationship. Via the Aplicor solution, hotels or other customer-centric organizations can track all customer support issues – regardless of whether they originate from a phone call or a Web portal – in a central repository to improve customer service and inform sales associates of any potential “hiccups” before and during the renewal process. Furthermore, it can help businesses analyze incidents, escalate issues and track the response.
And it can do all of this before a potentially disgruntled hotel guest can share a negative experience with several thousand friends on Facebook (News - Alert).
Edited by Stefania Viscusi