Luxury Hotelier’s 2007 Top Ten CRM Resolutions



The author of this article is Madigan Pratt. He is the Managing Director of Madigan Pratt & Associates, Inc., an award-winning Hospitality Marketing and CRM Consulting firm. MP&A specializes in helping small-to-mid-size hotels acquire and retain profitable customers and optimize revenue.

In this article, he focuses his attention on the notion of CRM and its benefits with a special program for luxury hotelier’s 2007 with the ten CRM resolutions as follows:

* Completely embrace my customers

* Conduct a CRM Audit

* Capture and protect relevant customer data

* Consider the benefits of CRM, not just the out-of-pocket costs, when budgeting my program

* Deliver relevant content to customers and prospects

* Banish “Email Blast” from my Lexicon

* Measure effectiveness and allocate resources according to ROI

* Treat marketing more as a science than an art

* Keep Top Management Intimately Involved

* Bring in outside resources as needed

I am totally agree with Madigan Pratt, the CRM is today the key of success. Customer relationship management software is defined as business management and automation of the front-office divisions of an organization. CRM software is essentially meant to address the needs of Marketing, Sales & Distribution and Customer Service and Support divisions within an organization and allow the three to share data on prospects, customers, partners, competitors and employees. The purpose of CRM software is to manage the customer through the entire lifecycle, i.e. from prospect to qualified opportunity to order.

CRM software automates many of the needs of Marketing, Sales and Support users, such as Telephony, or the ability to conduct phone calls and manage call data, and tools to capture, share and manage automated alerts on lead data as it passes through the sales pipeline. CRM software provides a standard framework for pushing leads through a sales pipeline and managing it amongst many stakeholders in real time, in order to provide better customer relations and grow revenues by creating more sales, and losing less customers.

CRM software helps organizations achieve the goal of excellent customer relations by measuring key performance indicators collected by the CRM software about customer lifecycle behaviour to isolate those marketing campaigns that drove the most and best quality leads, by allowing people to manage more business with less effort, never losing data on customers to eliminate deals slipping through the cracks and by providing good customer support to maintain the relationship with the customer for years to come.


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