The CRM challenge
Dan, the President of ABC Hotels firmly believed that having the best Customer Relations Management (CRM) system was the solution to achieving the hotel’s ROI goals, motivating his sales team and delighting hotel guests. He then hired a CRM vendor at a huge cost to engineer, install and implement the most technologically sophisticated system as quickly as possible. Thereafter, hotel staff CRM - users underwent an intensive training program to understand how the newly installed CRM system was going to increase business. Dan’s ‘Game Plan’ was now ready and set to go. Alas, his plan came crashing down as his sales team kept bickering about how well the old system was, while as guest satisfaction levels kept sliding down. Soon, It was ‘Game over’ for the Dan as the company replaced him with someone else. How did it all go wrong for Dan?
Customer Relations Management is a daunting journey with tough challenges. Done properly with a master plan at the beginning and ending with a technologically sound ‘fit-for-purpose’ solution, it would not only meet one’s requirements, but also help overcome the numerous hidden obstacles and dangerous corners on the road to success.
Dan’s fatal mistake was when he failed to run his plan through his top executives and all “C & B” levels of the hotel to obtain everyone’s ‘buy-in’. Furthermore, he neglected to study the company as a whole, not balancing his people’s needs with the technological realities to ensure that the hotel’s sales processes were enhanced not restricted. Failure to strike that delicate balance between technology, people and processes, where even overlooking just one element can be a disaster, led to the disharmony and his eventual dismissal. In this instance, not getting his people involved was his mistake.
Way back in the early 1980’s, whilst working as the Lobby Manager at a 500-room 5-star International hotel in Colombo, I recall the entire front office operation was manual. In those days, technology, especially in the hospitality industry, was in its infancy. Almost every large hotel used the ‘Whitney’ rack system - developed in 1940 and which, up until the electronic reservation systems became common, was considered highly efficient in managing reservations and front office operations.
The telex machine was the most reliable and fastest means by which businessmen connected globally. The hotel had a team of telex operators 24/7, punching furiously on the tapes to meet demand. Getting an overseas call via the hotel operator required a pre-booking thru the government-run department of telecommunications and could take several hours – which meant one had to stay close to the telephone in one’s room or anywhere in the hotel for hours. There was no direct-dial facility in Sri Lanka those days - despite the 1st long distance telephone call without operator assistance having taken place in 1947 in the US.
Check-outs were handled by the front desk cashier using NCR 42 machines. There was no connectivity with the hotel outlets / profit centres and periodically, stewards had to run over to the front desk at the lobby level, to hand over signed guest checks for posting to the relevant guest’s room bill. The hotel’s night club was on the top most hotel floor and to speed up things, there was a pneumatic tube system that was connected from the night club to the front desk cashier’s counter nine floors below. Signed guest checks were placed inside a metal carrier which then was inserted inside the tube. The suction created inside the tube kind of jet-propelled the carrier along the tube to the cashier’s desk.
Even at that time, the hotel, which ran an average 85% occupancy for several successive years had a large number of repeat guests. Every frontline employee including the telex operators knew their guests. The success of the ‘know your guest’ culture was mainly due to the ‘tracking’ and meticulous ‘capture’ of guest behaviours, preferences, observations (complaints as well), by all levels of frontline / service staff.
These priceless ‘nuggets’ of information were gathered and maintained at the front office, and made available to reservation staff. During the booking process, whatever available information relevant to any guest was retrieved and ‘flagged’ to all other key departments on the day of arrival. The high loyalty factor the hotel enjoyed was testimony to how well the system worked… all the time, every time and by everyone.
The point I wish to make here is that there is no escaping the required ‘hard work’ one has to put in, regardless of whether one has installed the most advanced CRM system. It is exactly this that many fail to understand – believing that technology will actively capture and feed the guest behaviours and data without human intervention. It simply doesn’t work like that.
Take for example John Doe who arrives one morning at your hotel with a golf bag amongst his luggage. This is the easiest scenario to read. The golf bag signals John’s passion for golf, and, an observant bell person who grabs his luggage, will not only inform of this to the receptionist, but immediately tell the concierge about it as well.
Picture how this works now. No sooner has John settled in his room, he is contacted by the concierge to enquire whether he would like to book for a round of golf at the nearest golf course in town. Likewise, Jane Doe who checked in with a Tennis racket, will be contacted to book a game at the hotel’s tennis courts. Meanwhile, John’s interests in Golf and Jane’s in tennis, is duly recorded under their names in ‘”guest History’ by the receptionist/s who did their check-in.
Notice that in the scenarios described above, technology comes into play much later –only from the stage where the receptionist feeds in John’ and Jane’s sporting interests. Most hoteliers believe that CRM systems will do the work done by the bellman and concierge (as in the two examples) and that’s a huge mistake.
Unless guest behaviour is observed, kept track of, fed into the system as well as retrieved at the appropriate moment, by people, the flow of information will not materialize.
Shafeek Wahab - Editor, Hospitality Sri Lanka, Consultant, Trainer, Ex-hotelier
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