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As the networked world around us changes by the day and internet-based e-commerce affords businesses ever-greater opportunities to engage in one-to-one marketing, the question arises as to how prepared is the hospitality industry to respond to the opportunities afforded by the new technologies ? A useful catchall phrase for the area of marketing that embraces these opportunities is "Customer Relationship Management" or "CRM". For CRM to be successful in a hospitality enterprise, one thing is certain, it requires visionary management and a commitment to invest in that most important of intangible assets the customer relationship. CRM can generate substantial profits, but it does require large volumes of easily accessed and analyzed information. And while some hospitality businesses are creating customer databases, the use of customer information is frequently intermittent, delayed and disintegrated. Most hospitality managers tend to rely on property-based occupancy, rate and financial data to benchmark against competitors and industry trends. And they generate information to measure customer satisfaction and use loyalty program databases to determine their most valuable customers. But these data and the analyses that surround them are frequently badly flawed because they give a far from comprehensive (or even realistic) view of the real value of the customer asset. In particular, they do not take into account all of the customers' value drivers. Similarly, loyalty program databases are often inaccurate because they tend not to include the most profitable, or sometimes even the most loyal, customers... To read the complete article, click here to download the printable pdf file (56 kb).
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