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If you have a hotel and you have guests, chances are you either already have or are looking for a hotel customer relationship management (CRM) tool. This technology appears simple in theory but can be tricky in practice when it comes to connecting all the dots between your hotel’s guests, their data, the places you interact with these guests, and the things your team can do to help each guest have an incredible experience.
In this guide we’ll answer three simple question:
Even more, we’ll explain the attributes and factors that are unique to the hospitality industry that your team needs to consider when shopping for a hotel CRM like Inntopia Marketing Cloud. Let’s jump in.
A hotel CRM is a tool that connects two parts of your business; what you know about your guests with the messages you send them. The first part – what you know about your guests – includes all the data you have in your property management system (PMS) as well as other systems including the tools you use sell things like spa reservations, marketing systems where guests are interacting with your hotel online, surveys where customers provide feedback about their stay, and other places your team interacts with the guests who have already visited your hotel or might visit in the future.
The second part is all the ways you reach out to your guests and interact with them. This includes the email campaigns you send, surveys designed to glean key insights, calls from guests to your call center, and even how they engage with your front desk. Ideally, your CRM should be making guests data accessible at each of these key touchpoints so your marketing, sales, and guest services teams can use guest data to inform their interactions and conversations.
In other words, a hotel CRM will aggregate, cleanse, and make guest data accessible to your teams so that you can use everything you know about your guest to enhance every interaction your guest has with your brand.
Let’s say that Julie Jones spends a weekend at your hotel every few months with her husband and two children. They love the two bedroom suite and every morning they have breakfast together in the cafe. Now, Julie came just a few weeks ago but you’re got a soft spot in your occupancy you’re trying to fill. If you send an email to Julie about an upcoming offer, is Julie more likely to act on that offer if it’s for:
We all know intuitively – and the data support this intuition – that Julie is much more likely to act on a message that speaks to her in language, imagery, and offers that are aligned to her exact situation, needs, and interests. That’s what the functionality of a CRM does. It creates powerful opportunities for customer engagement by taking everything you know about a guest across all of your systems, cleans and structures that data, organizes it into insightful guest profiles, integrates those guest profiles into every potential touchpoint across marketing, call center, guest service, etc., and then helps automate guest service and revenue generation based on the opportunities and behaviors it identifies.
That last point is really important. If Julie calls your call center and they’re helping her make a reservation, you’d want that agent to see exactly what she’s done in the past to help her plan her next stay. An agent without insight into a guest’s interests, needs, and behavior is flying blind. A good hotel CRM gives them all the information they need to serve that guest.
As we mentioned earlier, a CRM system is an all-in-one tool that has five primary tasks:
Each of these individual parts of a hotel CRM are important. Each is also often misunderstood or overlooked when shopping for a new customer relationship platform. So instead of answer this question as a whole, let’s talk through each each element of a hotel CRM individually.
The first step is aggregating all of the data you have about your guests. This is both a one time action to load historical data but also ongoing as new data is generated through things like transactions. A modern hotel CRM will create a connection to your PMS, POS, survey, marketing, and other systems to pull guest data out of those sources and into your central, CRM database. This may be done in real-time, nightly, weekly, or on other frequencies depending on your needs and the constraints of those systems. Some legacy PMS platforms, for example, weren’t built to share data with other systems and trying to grab data too frequently can strain the database and interrupt your team’s access. In this case, a nightly load might be appropriate.
The data in a good hotel CRM will be able to integrate into a single guest profile include individual transactions, booking history, survey responses, marketing engagements, and more. All of these data works together to help your marketing and guest services teams paint a complete picture of each person who visits your property.
Too often properties settle for a CRM that only organizes data from their PMS. A property CRM should be able to integrate data from all of the systems you use to run your hotel and serve your guests.
Next up is cleaning that data. This cleansing process is a vital step that is often overlooked but something that is part of the best hotel CRM platforms. To use our previous example, Julie Jones may have made bookings with her personal email address, her work email address, from her more address, from a different home address once they moved, or perhaps her husband made a couple of those bookings when she wasn’t able to. Your hotel CRM software needs to be able to recognize that all of those transactions apply to Julie’s household. This is important for two reasons.
Likewise if there was a typo or other issue in the data, a hotel CRM should be able to use many datapoints to connect the dots between hotel guests and avoid creating duplicate records in your CRM. Data in the hospitality industry is very unique relative to other industries, so choosing a platform that is built for hoteliers is critical. If Julie accidentally booked as Julei Davis instead of Julie Davis, you don’t want a duplicate record to be created that doesn’t tie back to her guest profile in your hotel’s CRM.
Once the data is cleansed, the hotel CRM software will accurately organize these guest insights within that guest’s profile. And not just for the guest, but for the household to ensure that families who travel together aren’t treated as multiple different guests and their behavior is accurately categorized. This is also true across multiple systems. These guest profiles will be able to show what a guest booked in the property management system, what their survey results were after that stay, what emails they opened before they booked, what activities they purchased from your POS, and so forth. Again, you don’t want multiple records for the same guest, you want one complete guest profile and a hotel CRM can provide that.
Using our example, if Julie’s husband books their weekend trip for their anniversary, the systems needs to use things like physical address and last name to ensure that this booking is tied back to the household’s profile so, once again, you see the full history of Julie’s interactions with your hotel when you look at her profile in the CRM.
Now, having this information about your guest is one thing, but your team needs to have access to that data so that as they talk to these guests they can customize those messages and interactions to their specific behaviors, preferences, and trends.
For example, a call center agent can use the hotel CRM to look up the guest they’re speaking with and see their full transaction history across all of your systems. Your marketing team can use the hospitality CRM to build a segment of guests who typically travel alone on midweeks with an average length-of-stay above 3 nights and use email marketing or SMS marketing to fill that soft midweeks you’re seeing in your occupancy pacing report. And the concierge should be able to see VIPs who are arriving today so they can find unique ways to serve and delight those guests. A sales manager on your hotel’s sales team can use guest data to identify future leads based on the behavior of previous guests. A hotel CRM gives each of these teams access to your guest profiles.
This is also true on the aggregate. If Julie gets an email from your hotel, the data in the CRM should be dynamically customizing what she sees so the message and imagery are relevant to her. This is only possible if the guest data in your hotel’s CRM is able to sync to the channels you use to communication with your guests. Another common mistake is hotels choosing a system that aggregates their data but then turns that aggregated guest data into another silo because it has no ability to get that data out and into the places it needs to exist to inform guest interactions.
Finally, your hotel’s CRM will allow you to automate alerts or messages based on guest behavior to identify issues that can be resolved or opportunities to provide guest service or generate revenue. These automation tools are especially powerful when paired with email marketing. For example, your CRM could set up a workflow to alert you if a VIP guest indicates they had a poor experience when filling out a post-stay survey so that your front desk, call center, or concierge can quickly intervene and remedy the situation before their loyalty is lost. Your marketing team could use the hotel CRM to automate an email to guests who only booked two nights of lodging encouraging them to stay an extra night. Or they could automatically trigger an pre-built email template shortly before the guest arrives helping them navigate transportation issues you often see showing up in low-NPS survey results or upselling them on experiences they haven’t purchased. Either way, automation has quickly become a key component of an effective hotel CRM that opens up incredible opportunities for revenue generation and guest service.
Using the example of Julie, this is where having all of her past data is so important. If you think Julie is a first-time guest and she has a bad experience, you may not realize the potential loyalty you are losing until it’s too late.
As we just mentioned, a CRM solution that is built for the hotel industry gives you visibility into your guest behavior in ways that allows you to do many things much better than if you were flying blind. Primarily, however, there are three key reasons you need a hotel CRM.
All of these will help your hotel business generate more revenue and guest satisfaction. Let’s talk through each one.
When a CRM system makes it so everything you know about your guests can influence every marketing message you send them, your performance can go through the roof. When hotels have switch to Inntopia Marketing Cloud, for example, we’ve had many say that they’re sending fewer email marketing campaigns than before but seeing 2-3x the revenue generated from those emails because they’re able to perfectly target guests based on their behavior or customize the contents of the email dynamically based on each guest’s data which, in turn, increases the match between the message the guest receives and the likelihood they’ll act on it.
For example, when Palmetto Dunes Oceanfront Resort switched to Inntopia, their team mentioned that:
“We’re sending the same volume of emails we did before and seeing significantly more traffic and conversions.”
This can only happen if your data is clean and in a system where it’s easy to build targeted, accurate lists that can be matched to targeted, relevant campaigns.
This is especially true when it comes to marketing automation. While building more targeted audiences on social media is absolutely enabled by your CRM, email automated based on guest behavior like check-ins or other points along the customer journey will generate incredible amounts of customer loyalty and revenue. The best part of automation is just what the name says: it’s automated. So if you identify an opportunity where a message could reach a really targeted, relevant type of behavior, you can set that up once and never have to touch it again.
If you need any ideas for ways to use marketing automation to serve your guests, check out our free guide to resort marketing automation. It provides 70, illustrated pages of insight into exactly how to use automation to drive revenue, satisfaction, and loyalty.
Without guest data all in the same place, it’s incredibly hard to get an accurate, comprehensive view of your hotel’s performance and trends. A hotel CRM’s ability to bring all of that data together and organize it in an easy-to-access place gives your team the opportunity to go behind things like RevPAR and occupancy as performance metrics and truly understand who is coming to your hotel, how they’re interacting with your property, staff, loyalty program, or marketing, why they’re coming to your hotel, who is most likely to return, what common factors are behind your most valuable guests, and understand where to focus your efforts with marketing and guest service to increase loyalty and streamline the guest experience.
This is true on the aggregate, but it’s also true on a more focused level. Being able to drill in to trends and behaviors based on very specific groups of hotel guests – VIPs, first-timers, families, etc. – opens up incredible opportunities for enhancing the guest experience and delivering more targeted marketing, all thanks to your CRM.
To that end, your hotel CRM software will also give you the insights you need to provide a level of customer support and guest service that’s simply not possible when your guest data is siloed and disorganized. Whether it’s recognizing a VIP at the front desk, tailoring a reservation to their specific needs in the call center, providing highly-relevant recommendations in pre-arrival and in-hotel messaging, or a dozen other opportunities, all of this is made possible by a CRM solution that connects everything you know about your guest to everyone at your hotel who is working to attract them to your property and help them have an incredible visit once they do.
This is where it’s critical your hotel’s CRM software is able to get this data into the hands of every member of every team. If your front desk or call center can’t access your CRM to see those guest profiles, they might as well not exist. This brings up another point with CRM technology: having control over who has access to what data. The platform you choose should allow you to control access by the exact role of each member of your team. For example, the front desk and call center only need guest profiles while the leadership team needs a high level view of everything across the hotel or across their entire portfolio.
It’s extremely tempting for budget-conscious hotels to simply go for the most affordable option. The dynamics of guest data, however, mean that the more you invest in unlocking the patterns and dynamics within this data, the greater the ROI you can generate. Marketing teams may compare pricing between two platforms, but the most important thing is to compare feature sets and the potential opportunities for increasing customer loyalty, improving the customer experience, and taking full advantage of your customer data in ways that align to your hotel’s specific needs.
Keep in mind that the ROI of an average hotel CRM platform may be in the 20:1 – 40:1 range, not bad, but compared the 100:1 and above many of our clients see by paying for better technology you start to realize the opportunity cost of this choice. And remember that ROI is based on both the revenue and the cost. If you pay twice the price for your CRM but get double the ROI, you’re not seeing double the revenue, you’re bringing in four times the revenue.
Choosing the best CRM software is a decision that every hotel needs to put careful thought and time into. And the answer may be different for each hotel, even different hotels within a portfolio. Ask questions like:
But even if you ask the right question, there are common pitfalls when choosing a resort CRM. Here are three common ones we see.
It’s easy to look at all hotels and think they’re roughly the same. But when you factor in the markets the serve, the level of service they provide, and the type of travelers they welcome, each is very unique. Choosing a hotel CRM that doesn’t let you customize the email templates you work with or the guest traits you want to group your customers into forces a unique brand into a one-size-fits-all box that isn’t worth the price, no matter how low.
Which brings us to the second mistake, choosing a hotel CRM purely on price. The difference between an average CRM and a great CRM may be a few hundred dollars a month in terms of price, but the difference in revenue generated (and, thus, ROI) between these systems can sometimes be 10x to 15x. A great CRM allows you to take advantage of the unique opportunities found within your guest data, not the generic opportunities that exist across an average hotel.
A CRM that can deliver business-changing ROI is not a toaster or a microwave. It’s not something you can buy one day and have a huge return on the next. It’s partly why CRMs have an odd perception in the hotel industry, simply because most CRMs try to be plug-and-play and, in return, deliver average results. A great hotel CRM will be a platform that you can build incredibly powerful marketing, guest service, and analysis on top of. Which means that you need a team you can lean on to take your vision and make it a reality. You’re the expert at your hotel’s business, they’re the experts at hotel CRM, and together you can do amazing things.
Hotel CRM software like Inntopia Marketing Cloud can help you solve these problems and more. So sit down with your team, identify the problems you need to solve, and take some time to shop around and find the perfect CRM for your property.
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