Benefits Of CRM In Hospitality Industry

Customer service is an important aspect of the hospitality industry. In fact, one can state that customer service is synonymous with the hospitality industry. As a significant part of the services industry, focusing on customer service in the hospitality industry is poignant for meticulous planning, more incoming customers, and increased customer satisfaction. The hospitality industry is a broader category and it covers important areas like lodging, food and beverages, lodging, travel, and tourism. It is not simple to concentrate on every sector individually through manual operations. To overcome this, companies belonging to this developing industry have started investing in software for the hospitality industry. Through this, they can effectively manage the different aspects of customer service and deliver a satisfactory service to the customers.

One such software that has become a fundamental part of the hospitality industry and hotel management, in general, is CRM. The benefits of CRM in hospitality industry are plentiful. Hence, we advise the integration of your hospitality management business with a CRM platform for increased results. Good customer service is one of the outcomes expected from a CRM in the hospitality industry. Apptivo CRM Software has all you need to manage your customer relations. The prime advantage of the Apptivo CRM platform is that it has the capability to adapt to businesses of any size and scale. Hence, your sales team and support team need not concentrate on building the CRM software from scratch to meet your business needs. Rather, you can strategically attend to the customer service and customer requests.

In this blog from Apptivo, we’ll discuss how do hotels use CRM and the importance of CRM in the hospitality industry.

How Does CRM Help Sales In Hospitality Industry

Customer relationship management kickstarts right when a lead visits your website or your social media profile. From there, they submit their information for further contact if they are curious about your services. This is applicable to sales in the hotel industry. Considering the hospitality industry is a booming industry, your marketing team might have applied for paid marketing to strengthen your digital presence. You should pay more attention to it when you have a number of key competitors in your area of service. Apptivo sales CRM has a complete suite of applications that assists your sales and marketing teams from capturing the leads, qualifying them through the sales process, and finally, converting them to loyal customers. By this, you can direct your teams on qualified leads and increase the overall sales. Apptivo aligns with your company goals and assists your teams throughout the customer journey thereby, recording every detail associated with the customer during the course of your interaction.

Importance Of CRM In Hospitality Industry

Apptivo is a powerful suite of 65+ applications that caters to different purposes from a single cloud ecosystem. The advanced features of Apptivo ensure smooth communication with customers and improve the retention rate. Let’s go through the advantages of the CRM platform in the hospitality sector.

1. Enhanced Customer Service

When it comes to hospitality, nothing can overcome the perks that can be attained through customer service. A customer can make or break a company’s business. Hence, most service-oriented companies focus and invest in solutions that enhance customer service. The hospitality business thrives on customer feedback. If the customer feedback is not satisfactory, it has a direct impact on the customer retention rate and hinders signs up from new leads. The primary advantage of CRM in the hospitality industry is its ability to streamline customer service.

Apptivo is equipped multi-channel support system that helps customers to record their grievances and queries depending on their preference. All these grievances are collected in a single system where the support engineers provide solutions. The customer relationship management tool of Apptivo assigns the incoming tickets to employees depending on their availability and allocates a time period through its specialized SLAs. Using this feature, customers can enjoy timely service and stay in the loop on the smallest updates related to their tickets. If they are not happy with the customer service or if anything is missing from their package, they can simply raise a ticket and the support team will handle the rest.

2. Automated Process

Every organization has a predefined process for interacting with customers. This process makes the operations smooth as the support and service agents need not reach out to one another on queries related to the process. They can simply follow the process and consequently, make standardized communication with the customers. Apptivo CRM platform includes automation tools that take care of redundant manual tasks. For instance: The triggers facility of Apptivo automatically updates the value in a record if the criteria match. In short, the employees don’t have to manually locate the record, track the updates, and make changes.

This automation facility does not extend only to the customer service department. But, also to internal communication and tracking new leads. Apptivo’s Hotel CRM system sends automated emails to leads as soon as they enter the sales cycle. The hospitality CRM Software ensures that appropriate actions are taken for multiple scenarios depending on the predefined process configuration. The CRM for the hospitality industry sends automatic reminders on new bookings, payments, cancellations, and thank you messages on check-outs. It also sends promotional messages during peak seasons and keeps all customers informed on the upcoming offers. Apptivo manages all these tasks and other services right from a single CRM Software.

3. Track Customer Engagement

Customer engagement is a key metric using which employees can assess the frequency of interactions of a particular customer with a company. In the hospitality industry, customer engagement helps to identify valuable customers and alter the sales strategy depending on the customer engagement rate. Apptivo CRM in the hospitality industry enables employees to track the engagement rate with every customer and offer promotions depending on the service levels. For example, if a valued customer has a higher customer engagement rate, then your team can offer additional promotions and offers to keep the customer from leaving your business.

The Collaboration tools of Apptivo include emails, call logs, notes, agenda, calendar, a news feed, and document manager through which employees can document every interaction with the customer. If a customer has placed a call regarding room service, the service team can easily receive the request through the CRM and reach out to the customer for timely delivery of service. Also, if the customer has scheduled a pick-up at a particular time from the Airport, the hotel staff or managers can block the slot in the agenda, get prior reminders, and meet the customer without any delay.

4. Performance Tracking

To ensure quality services, particularly in the hotel industry, it is essential to train the employees on the prompt delivery of services. This is crucial because these employees represent the company and it is up to them to make sure that the customers are retained and they keep coming back for your services. To achieve this, having a normal assessment system will not get the task done. Normal assessment can fail to take a particular parameter into account or make errors while scaling the performance of employees.

The CRM for the hospitality industry has performance tracking dashboards that monitor the performance of every employee and their team. Also, the dashboards give a complete picture of the number of customers entering the sales funnel and the exact percentage of them converted into loyal customers. With this, the sales manager can assess the quality of service delivered by every employee and take appropriate measures to level up the training offered. An efficient feedback system will enable employees and sales managers to optimize the service provided in this service industry.

5. Integrated System

The hospitality industry includes several departments like finance, accounting, field services, grievance management, employee tracking, and many more. Customer service and sales are one such department. To accommodate all these departments, hotels and other tourism companies prefer software for the hospitality industry that caters to the requirements of all the departments. For instance, it is really comfortable if there is an exclusive application to deal with the billing system. By this, the receptionist can easily generate invoices and collect the payments effortlessly from the customers.

Apptivo has 65+ applications that are categorized under 15+ solutions. These solutions boost the productivity obtained through CRM in the hospitality industry. Apptivo has exclusive applications to channel the efficiency of different departments in the hotel industry. These applications are integrated with each other with the ability to move the data effortlessly from one application to another as they pass through different sales stages.

Conclusion

The hospitality industry is a growing industry and it is the responsibility of every employee in an organization to deliver optimized services to the customers. Customer service is the backbone of the hospitality industry. Hence, companies must sign up for a CRM solution that enhances the customer experience, increases the retention rate, and reduce customer churn. Sign up for Apptivo today to streamline your hospitality services.

Also, Read

• How CRM Improve Business Performance
• What Is Lead Management Process?
• 5 Smart Ways To Manage Your Real Estate Leads – Real Estate CRM