How to enhance Customer Relationship in Hospitality Industry?

​Customers are the backbone of any kind of business activities. Maintaining relationship with them yields better results. By capturing, tracking and analyzing customer data, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) enables a firm to identify new performance issues. CRM is a powerful management tool that can be used to exploit sales potential and maximize the value of the customer to the hospitality industry. Hospitality sector’s greatest assets are their knowledge of their customers. They can use this asset and turn it into key competitive advantage by retaining those customers who represent the highest lifetime value and profitability.  

Most hotels spend heavily towards enhancing customer experiences through various marketing ploys. They offer loyalty programs and other exclusive benefits to capture the customer’s attention. But, these promotions tend to become heavy on their pockets. Hence, including Social CRM mechanism in their framework will see a significant cut-down in their costs and also lessen the outreach efforts. Social CRM is the use of social media services, techniques and technology to enable organizations to engage with their customers. As we know, the Hospitality industry is heavily dependent on Word-of-Mouth. It can benefit immensely from Social CRM which is nothing but an electronic version of Word-of-Mouth. One thing to be kept in mind is that, any amount of negative feedback from customers can act as a dampener and affect sales, and the brand itself.

Tips to implement Social CRM

1. Understand your Conversation Map. Listen and understand the social media conversations from advocates to influencers and from detractors to consumers.

2. Understand the Social Graph of your customers. This is very important. It refers to your current customer in your CRM system, marketing database or customer datamart. Are they on WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, forums, external communities, etc?

3. Have a Social Graph of your Best Customers. Are your best customers using social media? Can you start engaging them for your own pilots? What other types of customers can you engage? Again, these are known customers in your CRM system or Loyalty Program.

4. Establish processes & requirements to meet your goals and objectives based on current needs and the analysis from the above 3 steps.

5. Get ready to put together a social media plan based on the requirements and processes. Do you need to be on Facebook? Do you need call center integration? Do you need to integrate social media marketing with your marketing strategy? Do you need a community to provide ideas and collaboration for customer support? Do you have a social media manager and policies in place?

6. Have your traditional CRM ready for social media. Do you have the workflow, processes, rules, data structure, training, call center, people, etc., ready to manage communities and social media channels?

7. If your customer or influencers are already collaborating using social media, is your enterprise ready to collaborate internally?

However, one area of concern in this industry is the lack of qualified social media personnel with Hotel Management background. Some hotels have already started including knowledge of social media as a requirement into entry-level job roles, while most hotels have simply engaged a social media agency to carry out the task and rely on them to implement effective social media marketing strategies and Social CRM to manage guest reviews, measure results, engage and communicate effectively with potential customers through social media platforms and blogs.

​Once your business starts to look after its existing customers effectively, efforts can be concentrated on finding new customers and expanding your market. The more you know about your customers, the easier it is to identify new prospects and increase your customer base. Even with years of accumulated knowledge, there's always room for improvement. Customer needs change over time, and technology can make it easier to find out more about customers and ensure that everyone in an organization can exploit this information.