Hospitality CRM Solution for Travel, Hotel & Hospitality Industry: Why You Need It

Eight Benefits of CRM for Hospitality Industry

The broad category of the hospitality industry covers important businesses like lodging, food and beverages, lodging, travel, tourism, event planning, entertainment, etc. Marketing and sales delivering the ultimate personalized customer experience to get more business in a competitive and challenging marketing environment is a complex task that can't be accomplished effectively manually. To overcome this issue, an increasing number of businesses in the hospitality sector have started investing in custom hospitality CRM software. One of the top bespoke CRM companies in the UK, Web Alliance in Northampton, promises several benefits of custom CRM for hospitality industry; the top 8 hospitality CRM benefits are-

Generates Leads Through Omnichannel Lead Capturing: The custom CRM for hospitality industry captures leads from multiple online hotel and resort marketplaces, online advertisements, social media platforms, television ads, and even print ads. The CRM solution integration captures all activities of potential clients whether they search for hotel alternatives, buy a deal to stay, send emails, or receive emails or SMS, or communicate via other channels.

Tracks Conversations with Customers and Prospects: Hospitality CRM integration enables you to document every phone call whether it is incoming or outgoing. Tracking of new booking inquiries helps you generate fresh leads. Records of existing clients are automatically updated to reflect interactions.

Automates & Simplifies Booking Workflows: Hospitality CRM automates SMS and email communications with new prospects identified at your booking agents and channel partners. Automated communication reduces response time to close the deal faster.  

Manages Inventory & Room Occupancy: Hospitality CRM supports operations management (OM) and property management systems (PMS). It helps you manage online reputation management, data management, data analysis, supply management, room service, housekeeping, etc.

Automates Invoice and Quotation Creation: Bespoke CRM software for hospitality industry are designed with integrated accounting tools that automate creating quotations, invoices, notifications, etc.

Organize Your Inquiries: Bespoke CRM software for hospitality industry handles inquiries efficiently with the least involvement of salespeople. Custom CRM solution integrates phone calls, emails, SMS, chats, and social media accounts into a single Omni-channel dashboard available anywhere for authorized representatives.  

Marketing via Personalized Outreach and Engagement: Hospitality CRM empowers marketing campaigns with modified strategies through different channels including personalized email, social media marketing, advertising, and messaging. The data-driven metrics, stored automatically, help marketing and sales teams to perform better. 

Increases Social Engagement: The collected data about the communication and interaction with potential clients and existing customers provides insights about customer behaviour and expectations that help you improve operational processes.

Shorter Sales Cycle: Bespoke hospitality CRM integration helps your sales teams to close deals faster and get repeat business. A personalized sales approach and scheduled follow-ups with fast responses without dependency upon others help your salespeople to achieve a better conversion rate.

Improved Customer Support Quality: Personalized customer support strengthens brand’s reputation and customers’ trust resulting in more referral bookings and revenue.

Choosing the Best CRM for Hotel, Leisure & Hospitality Business

Regardless of CRM goals, the starting point is a database building containing all the critical information of your contacts and prospects. This built-up database, backed by AI, needs to be segmented and filterable for particular objectives; so that, you can explore the particular segment of contacts based on given criteria. To choose the best CRM for hotel, leisure, and hospitality business, you should essentially consider the following aspects-

1. B2B CRM or B2C CRM: B2C CRM is focused on relationships with individual guests and channel partners. B2B CRM is focused on relationships with prominent brands and corporate sector that can bring business to your hotel.
2. Easy to Integrate: It should be suitable to existing tech stack and operating environment in line with operational and marketing strategies.
3. Multi-channel: It should offer numbers of ways/channels to communicate with potential clients and stakeholders. 
4. Automation: Automation simplifies and faster operations including marketing and sales with reduced chances of errors.
5. Flexible: The selected CRM for leisure, hotel and hospitality business should be flexible to accommodate the changing needs in different verticals as your business grows. Therefore, the majority of leisure, hotel and hospitality businesses in the UK prefer bespoke CRM solutions rather than off-the-shelf software solutions. 
6. Within Budget: The selected CRM for leisure, hotel and hospitality business should be well under the budget limit sparing the space for training required, upgrade, and maintenance. 
7. Secure: The bespoke CRM allows you to build and manage a database as per your specific needs but the security of collected data is an important selection criteria. 
8. Mobile: All the users should be able to get the desired information on the go to take quick decision and to act without waiting for information to be shared.   

Things to Consider For Hospitality Management CRM Integration

The interactions with customers have always been a driving force behind the ever-evolving marketing and sales strategies; therefore, an increasing number of hospitality businesses are embracing CRM specially developed to address their concerns for improving performance, productivity, reputation, and growth rate. The right CRM software for hotels and hospitality businesses improves customer experiences, analyzes bulk data, automates tasks, streamlines employee experiences, reduces marketing expenses, streamlines workflows, and more. The key features of CRM for hospitality industry, you must have, are-

• Automated communication
• Availability of a unified platform
• IVR and telephony integration
• Activity logs
• Lead generation from different sources
• Quotation management
• Marketing Capabilities
• CRM personalization and adaptability
• Smartphone app
• Ticketing and helpdesk
• Data quality and security
• Notifications 
• IT policy compliant

The advanced bespoke CRM software for the hospitality industry should be capable of auto-enriching each prospect's details from the social profiles, automatically assigning prospects to the suitable agent, alerting the agents, tracking and capturing the prospect's activities, using score buying signals, etc. Every hospitality business has its unique requirements, concerns, and objectives; therefore, off-the-shelf software solution hardly fits most hospitality businesses; here, comes the role of bespoke hospitality CRM companies.

Sustainability has become a critical issue for the hospitality industry in the UK for 2023 of changing competitive challenges, rising costs, and new reforms. Guests expect personalized experiences. Technological advancement with custom CRM integration has become inevitable for the hospitality industry in the UK.