Customer relationship management, or CRM, is a popular topic in today's business literature and reflects the set of values most hospitality businesses have embraced. The challenge for management, however, is to provide clarity of vision and then drive the company's CRM strategy toward this singular vision. Managers typically have a variety of opinions as to where to place emphasis, especially if as is frequently the case, resources are limited and capital must be allocated to a variety of competing needs. In the study, Hospitality 2000: The Technology, CRM was a featured case study at one of the industry's leading hospitality companies.

CRM is frequently launched without an adequate business case in place, making the process of measuring and monitoring progress quite challenging. The task at the front end of any CRM project should therefore be to define guest loyalty enhancements, revenue improvement opportunities and costs savings and finally the metrics to be used to measure performance of the CRM system itself.

Designing and developing a complex CRM system requires a broad base of marketing, organization, technical and financial skills. If CRM is to drive increased productivity in sales and marketing, processes frequently need to be restructured to ensure the business is leveraging everything CRM can deliver. Behavioral, attitudinal and demographic factors must also be addressed in order to value the customer asset.

The typical hospitality business has many customer touch–points (the hotel, the central reservation system's call centers, the website, the sales office, global distribution systems), some of which the company doesn't always control or where there is little deployment of technology to capture customer information. These are challenges that must also be addressed and factored in the CRM planning process.

Roundhill Hospitality's CRM practice is focused on responding to a variety of issues including: how should CRM fit into overall strategy? what are the key elements of a successful CRM system? what is the business case for CRM? what is the process for design and development of a CRM system? how will CRM improve the productivity of sales and marketing people and marketing expenditures? how should customer loyalty be measured? do loyalty programs improve customer loyalty? what is the ROI on such programs? how can market research be improved and integrated into a CRM system? how can multiple customer touch–points be integrated?

For more information about Roundhill Hospitality's CRM Practice, please contact us.