MUNICH—Maintaining a relationship with the guest is critical for any hotel. NextGuest CRM has launched solutions designed to empower single-property hotels and small to mid-size hotel groups with CRM capabilities.
“If we look back, the first CRM solutions in the 1990s were just trying to replace the rolodexes,” said Dieter Dirnberger, CEO at NextGuest CRM. “Over time, the CRM industry has changed quite dramatically, now offering not just contact and activity management like back in early days, but we now have sales automation solutions, customer service delivery automation and marketing automation accompanying the customer throughout the digital guest journey. Every vendor has its own flavor of CRM solution, but it’s clear that the systems are getting broader and offer more functionalities. Today’s CRM needs to cover much more functional areas and integrate with more third-party solutions as the CRM has become the centerpiece of the hospitality data management landscape and its various data sources.”
Dirnberger noted that despite the complexity, it’s important to make CRM simple to use and actionable. “Many organizations still struggle to use CRM applications to their full extent and don’t get the full ROI on the investment,” he said. “Finding the root cause of operational problems, and analyzing and taking immediate corrective actions to mitigate the problem in one go are still challenging for many organizations. For example, if you see an increasing number of OTA bookings or if you face churn in your premium guest segment, what can you do to mitigate this? What targeted campaigns or marketing activities could you run through the CRM to address these challenges and increase direct business and repeat customers?”
NextGuest CRM’s new solutions include Easy Campaign, which lets single or independent hotel group properties set up and automate personalized transactional emails and start basic campaigns; and Easy CRM, with which small to mid-size hotel groups with five or more properties can tap into the CRM and leverage automated and highly personalized campaigns based on guest information within various data sources.
“The Easy-product range is, as the name indicates, focused around super-simple yet powerful usability, allowing our customers to jump-start working with transactional guest communication or marketing campaigns by using our library of pre-built marketing templates and content,” Dirnberger said. “The reason we developed these solutions is that we believe that a solution is only truly beneficial if it can quickly add value. The solution needs to be easy to use and should require no or very little training. It is also important that our customers can benefit from our experience working with some of the most powerful brands in the industry for more than 20 years.”
Easy Campaign has an email template library, but a personal touch, corporate design or custom template is available via a new Campaign Manager and Wizard. For transactional campaigns, reservations data from the PMS is converted into emails sent to guests on the fly. Users do not need PMS access to set up marketing campaigns: Staff can upload contact lists to use for newsletter blasts, seasonal campaigns and other promotions.
Easy CRM focuses on campaign automation and advanced personalization. Integration with PMS, CRS, IBE, and other systems enables users to leverage guest information; the centralized CRM profile gathers all information per guest in all group properties in a single digital guest card. Staff can use this insight to increase the guest experience on site or to segment guest profiles for ad-hoc, scheduled or automated marketing campaigns.
Dirnberger stressed the importance of integration. “In many hotels, the management, operations and marketing departments are using different tools,” he said. “As a result, if operations identifies a problem, it can be difficult for the marketing team to create a campaign that addresses the issue, simply because they’re not looking at the same data, or not looking at it in the same way. It is key that the CRM platform suggest intuitive, data-driven campaigns based on the same data and insights seen by all teams. To put it simply, the CRM system needs to combine analytics and marketing automation in order to support operations, marketing and management teams with a single solution.”
When developing these solutions, Dirnberger said, the company listened to its customers. “We had many conversations with customers, prospects, industry experts as well as our own research,” he said. “With the Easy-product lines, we can offer solutions for single-property hotels as well as hotel chains—and they all will benefit from the simplicity, powerful wizards and pre-built templates and designs.”