Make Your CRM Work Across Every Department, Not Just Marketing

by Niels Mekenkamp, Director of Business Solutions, EMEA at Cendyn

CRMs power up businesses, and for hotels, this keeps guests returning time and time again. But without a people-first approach, the CRM can fail. I’ve seen it first-hand: that Eureka moment when hotel staff see the benefits of the CRM, and everything changes. Here’s why your hotel’s Find, Book, and Grow strategy relies on your staff to actively engage with the CRM.

A CRM speaks to everything hotels stand for. Striking up meaningful engagement with existing guests, inspiring them to come back, and encouraging them to ditch the OTA for direct bookings.

Ultimately, hotels need to capture the information that transforms the guest experience. On-property, this enables great hospitality to shine; offering personalized welcomes, thoughtful gifts, and pre-empting requests or preferences before a guest even asks. It’s all in the communications: ahead, during, and after their stay, keeping them engaged with thoughtful upsells and imagination-sparking offers.

So once you’ve invested in a CRM, what next? How do you guarantee adoption and maximize impact? And what do staff across the business need to be aware of to secure success?

The barriers to CRM adoption

Investing in and installing a CRM is important. But it’s just as critical to invest in your team to ensure adoption to achieve your business objectives. 

 Often the barriers to successful CRM adoption are totally unrelated to the system itself. 

While the CRM enables you to reach out to an existing customer base, if your data isn’t clean, or your domain isn’t warm and recognized as ‘safe’ by email systems, you’ll fall at the first hurdle.

Ultimately, you need to determine what you want to get out of the CRM for your brand before initiating the installation process. It’s then crucial to engage and train staff on the system and help them understand how it will work for them as well as your guests. Recognize this is change management in action, and it’s closely entwined with workplace culture and team spirit. 

Where should frontline staff be capturing data using the CRM?

The marketing team is often the department managing the CRM, using it for campaigns and drumming up business. Revenue teams can use it to understand income streams and opportunities. While the General Manager and central management get insights to help with top-level strategic decisions.

But this all hinges on staff across the hotel putting clean and relevant information into the systems. Frontline staff have the most facetime with guests; they’re your primary guest data gatherers. And the information they glean needs to be entered.

If there’s one thing staff should start with, it’s email addresses. Shockingly, this is still missing from many guest profiles in countless hotel CRMs, often because OTAs don’t share this booking information.

There’s a whole host of other data frontline staff can easily get, and key moments when they can seamlessly capture information. For example:

• Emails, phone numbers, and other key data can be entered at check-in, whether it’s in-person, via tablets, or kiosks. Cendyn CRM has a Front Desk module to aid this.
• Guest visits to F&B outlets present opportunities for staff to log meal preferences, allergies, and special occasions guests are celebrating.
• Health and wellbeing data is usually captured during spa visits anyway, so adding it directly to the CRM at this point should be easy.
• Existing processes such as Wi-Fi sign-ups and surveys offer logical opportunities to collect full names, date of birth, email addresses, and more.

Cendyn will soon be launching AI-driven prompts to help frontline staff identify and ask for missing information such as email addresses. It will also help them use captured preferences to improve the guest experience. For example, if a guest has previously booked spa treatments, it will prompt staff to offer a spa treatment. Powered by the CRM, this will enable hotel staff to transform mundane moments into magical ones.

So why are you still not getting essential data?

You have the CRM. You know the easy touchpoints for data gathering. So why aren’t staff inputting the data?

If this is a problem for your hotel, it’s probably because staff don’t see the value.

You need to bring staff into the conversation. Help them understand what it means for their jobs and the wider functioning of the hotel and guest experience. Put them in the shoes of their guests and ask for their ideas on how and when to capture more data. Enable them to see how guest satisfaction brings revenue, and how this brings more opportunities for employees to shine, grow, and seek promotion.

It works.

One hotel I spent time with had a representative from every department attend the weekly meeting. They were each tasked to bring an idea on how to improve guest satisfaction to drive revenue. Everyone from housekeeping to maintenance brought their best ideas. I could see how they felt part of something: there was collectiveness, solidarity, and a little bit of competition! Initiatives like this help define a hotel culture of being one team, serving the same guests. And the CRM can be a tool that binds everything and everyone together.

Tips to spur on CRM adoption in hotels

Drawing on my time working in and with hotels, here’s what works to drive CRM adoption:

• Find some quick wins to show staff the value and potential of the CRM. Work with the Cendyn team for advice on how to make some immediate gains.
• Talk to hotel staff about their expectations. Away from work, it’s likely that your team is disappointed when they don’t receive personalization from companies they engage with? Remind them how this feels. Since hospitality is very much a people business, it’s your job to help guests feel special.
• Don’t expect too much at once. Plan to focus on one objective with the CRM at a time, such as increasing the number of captured email addresses. Spread out the rollout of using the various CRM fields and functionalities, adding new requests to employees every six months through training.
• Set targets to inspire some healthy internal competition. Celebrate achievements and key milestones with the team, at all levels. Make everything   transparent and accessible; share team performance in work spaces to show the impact of their work, from reservations from campaigns to newsletter subscribers it all serves as simple yet positive affirmations.
• Implement workflows and automated processes. Start by sending guests single use codes to say ‘Happy Birthday’, and incentives when guests stay for a minimum number of nights. Ask hotel staff what they think guests would respond well to. Once you’ve set it up, the system will take care of the rest.

Lead by example. Ensure CRM usage is part of performance reviews from the top level.

A people-powered CRM for growth

The CRM is ultimately about people, not technology. It’s designed to help you better engage with guests, driving guest satisfaction, revenue, and profitability. And it takes engaged hotel staff to successfully implement it and maximize its potential. This requires a period of change management, where staff realize they own it, have autonomy, and are driven to engage with it.

Inspired by central management, frontline staff need to become CRM stakeholders. Everyone can own a part of the CRM. It takes a little time, but there are quick wins to be had along the journey towards achieving the long-term strategy. 

Hotels put so much effort into the Find and Book phases of the guest journey. Now it’s time to put the emphasis on the CRM in order to Grow.

This article originally appeared on HSMAI Europe.