travel crm research paper | roars technologies

Travel CRM

Research Analysis Report

Initial Release

Author: Shinod B.M

Date of Issue: 7 June 2013

Distribution: Rinkesh Shah

Roars Technologies Pvt Ltd

KINDLY ADHERE: This commercial statement of work is not to be shared with any employee of Roars except the

person who is sending this document or the person in CC of the email of this document.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

DOCUMENT OVERVIEW ........................................................................................ 3

WHAT IS CRM? ...................................................................................................... 3

POSITIVE EFFECTS OF TRAVEL CRM ....................................................................... 5

CRM TODAY! ......................................................................................................... 5

CUSTOMIZED SOLUTIONS ..................................................................................... 6

CRM & TRAVEL INDUSTRY ..................................................................................... 7

IMPLEMENTATION FEATURES ............................................................................... 8

TRAVEL CRM ON THE GO! – SMARTPHONE APPS ................................................12

PRECAUTIONS ......................................................................................................14

CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................15


Travel CRM

Travel CRM|Confidential | of 15

DOCUMENT OVERVIEW

The Following document is a Research Analysis Report for the Travel Industry and its need for a

Customer Relationship Management System (CRM). It will cover why a CRM System is essential

and what benefits will it provide. The document will also provide information on what it takes

for a successful implementation of a CRM System.

WHAT IS CRM?

CRM is the abbreviation for customer relationship management. It entails all aspects of

interaction that a company has with its customer, whether it is sales or service-related. CRM is

often thought of as a business strategy that enables businesses to:

Understand the customer

Retain customers through better customer experience

Attract new customer

Win new clients and contracts


Travel CRM


Increase profitably

Decrease customer management costs

While the phrase customer relationship management is most commonly used to describe a

business-customer relationship, CRM systems are used in the same way to:

Manage Business Contacts

Clients

Contract Wins

Sales Leads.

Staff Access

Customer relationship management solutions provide you with the customer business data to

help you provide services or products that your customers wants, provide better customer

service, cross-sell and up sell more effectively, close deals, retain current customers and

understand who the customer is.


Travel CRM


POSITIVE EFFECTS OF TRAVEL CRM

Fast and flexible planning of contacts

Supports entire workflow

Increase your sales by running targeted promotions and communication campaigns

based on your customer preferences and past booking history

Optimize your customer’s interaction processes within your company’s marketing, sales

and service departments

Increase customer satisfaction

Decrease communication costs for customer relationship activities

Guarantee real time instant access to all business partner information from all locations

of your company at any time

Build long-lasting customer relationships due to a better understanding of customer

needs

CRM TODAY!

Technology and the Web has changed the way companies approach CRM strategies because

advances in technology have also changed consumer buying behaviour and offers new ways for

companies to communicate with customers and collect data about them. With each new

advance in technology -- especially the proliferation of self-service channels like the Web and

Smartphone -- customer relationships is being managed electronically.

Many aspects of CRM relies heavily on technology; however the strategies and processes of a

good CRM system will collect, manage and link information about the customer with the goal of

letting you market and sell services effectively.


Travel CRM


Organizations frequently looking for ways to personalize online experiences (a process also

referred to as mass customization) through tools such as help-desk software, email organizers

and different types of enterprise applications.

Many organizations turn to CRM software to help them manage their customer relationships.

CRM technology is offered on-premise, on-demand or through Software as a Service.

CUSTOMIZED SOLUTIONS

All the mentioned above CRMs provide a Ready Made solution. But the need of the hour is a

CUSTOMIZED CRM SOLUTION. The reasons for it are very simple:

Exclusivity

Every company is different—so of course no two companies can have the same CRM

solution.

Business Logics

Customization isn’t just about data. What about logic: those all-important business

rules?

o Salespeople need to route orders

o Service agents need to validate customer entitlements

You’ll have dozens of business rules to add into your CRM app

Website Connectivity

CRM begins with your Web site: generating leads, delivering product information, and

servicing customers. With the Customized CRM, your CRM app and your Web site work

together seamlessly. Customer data captured on the Web flows right into your CRM app.


Travel CRM


Customization- all the Way

Although one CRM user may need access to a critical piece of data—let’s say her

commission—other users shouldn’t be allowed to see it. Customized CRM provides

granular security and sharing rules to let you decide which users see what information,

all the way down to the field level.

CRM & TRAVEL INDUSTRY

Travel Industry has varied fields and categories:

Tour Operators

Travel Agency

Travel Suppliers

A CRM for Travel Industry has main focus on optimizing the business processes of tourism

companies. As mentioned earlier each Business and Industry is Exclusive, so each has its own

CRM techniques.

Analyze - Analyze existing processes and jointly consider how to optimize them with the

help of the CRM.

Improve - As part of a business process analysis, we observe and improve your internal

workflow.

Reorganize - As a result of the reorganization, many of your internal processes will be

integrated and automated.

Productivity - This avoids errors and media breaks, cuts your process costs and shortens

response times when dealing with your customers and suppliers. In short: boosts your

productivity as a tour operator.


Travel CRM


IMPLEMENTATION FEATURES

Following is a list of Basic Features which can be implemented for a Travel Industry Business.

These are just a bird’s eye view and more detailed features can be implemented after a detailed

study of the Business Process.


Travel CRM


Campaign Management

o Versatile and extensive campaign management functionalities

o Direct and fast search and selection of customers

o Run standard, easy or expert campaigns

o Filter by distribution channels, characteristics and any field used in the customer

management profile

Conduct campaigns via e-mail, mail and surveys within minutes

o Classify your customers based on booking behavior, e.g. assign attributes based

on travel history, e.g. find all customers who have already traveled to Hawaii for

more than 5 times and assign these customers to Hawaii lovers

Web based software

o CRM Access will be available through the internet

o Uses only a web browser to access CRM on Distributed Hosting Environment or

deploy the CRM on your own server

o Make it accessible from any secure internet connection

Integration into your Website and Internet Booking Engine

o Easily connect your website or Internet Booking Engine to CRM

o Integrate your catalog ordering process

o Manage your newsletter subscriptions

Vouchers & Coupons Management

o Direct implementation of vouchers and coupons on the website

o Assign these vouchers to campaigns and link them for the customers

o Popularize vouchers and coupons for increasing sales and generate revenues.


Travel CRM


Travel Agency Partner Management

o Store and view contact information of agents and agencies

o Assign agent to your travel agency partner

o Visualize all travel agency partner’s interactions on one screen:

See all bookings made by partner

View and access all complaints with clients from this travel agency

partner

View amount of brochures ordered by this agency partner

View number of customers participating in campaigns

o Rate and accordingly manage the travel agencies based on customer reviews and

feedback.

Customer Profile Management

o Store and synchronize the data of all your contacts including direct customers,

travel agency partners, customers who came in via a travel agency, prospects

and your suppliers

o Store address, travel fellow, passport, member get member information and

much more

o Assign an agent to your customer

o Add characteristics to your contacts, get to know your contacts and use it when

you need it

o Collect additional data like language preference, newsletter bans and more

o Attach notes to your profiles to share with your colleagues

o Check for duplicates

o Store payment conditions and loyalty card information

o Visualize all client’s interactions on one screen:

Profile

Complaints


Travel CRM


Bookings

Company and Supplier Information Management

o Access and manage all company and supplier data

o Manage all contact persons

Complaint Management

o Manage any possible complaints about your bookings or services included in a

booking proactively

o Match complaint types to a customer, travel agency profile, booking and content

services

o Push back the complaint to your service provider and partners

o Propose and assign complaint and compensation type to rectify the situation

o Assign non-monetary reimbursements to your customers

o Deal in a professional manner with your customer by sending out statement

letters and compensation vouchers from your suppliers

o Store contact log

o Schedule activities to follow up on closing the process cycle

o Further the possibility of converting complaining clients into long term satisfied

clients

Statistics and Report Management

o Consolidated and up-to-date statistics and reports of customer and booking data

o Standard predefined reports of customer and booking statistics

o Multifaceted statistics, e.g. Top-Ten, customer rankings

o Export to MS Excel Format, CVS and more


Travel CRM


TRAVEL CRM on THE GO! – SMARTPHONE APPS

Today, the term App is firmly rooted in our language and has become a part of daily life. So

make your tourist software available as a mobile application as well?

Support your employees in their daily work

Offer your customers added value by letting them access the data quickly easily from

anywhere.

Benefits for Business o Mobile data management — for immediate data availability in the system

o Control of internal processes through integrated task management

o Task assignment by the sales force on the go

o Greater sales potential thanks to the right information at the right time and the right

place

Benefits for Staff

o No elaborate printing of all customer information before the meeting

o Mobile navigation to the meeting point

o Allows spontaneous, unplanned calling on customers since all information

o Entering all information and notes right after the meeting, not later in the office

o Single source — a complete mobile office including telephone, email, navigation and

CRM

Benefits for Customers o All your customers need to do to immediately have full access to their booking data

is to download and install the Small App.

o The app connects to the reservation system and downloads all the details of booked

travel plan.


Travel CRM


o This can be divided into following sections:

Before the journey

Upon arrival

During the stay

Upon departure

After returning

o Travelers can thus catch up on all the details of their booked services — anytime,

anywhere.

o An example for this could be a Google map can opens up directly from the booked

hotel services, showing the traveler the location of the hotel and how to get back. Or

the travelers


Travel CRM


PRECAUTIONS

WIKIPEDIA says “In 2003, a Gartner report estimated that more than $1 billion had been spent

on software that was not being used. According to KEN Insights, less than 40 percent of 1,275

participating companies had end-user adoption rates above 90 percent. Many corporations only

use CRM systems on a partial or fragmented basis. In a 2007 survey from the UK, four-fifths of

senior executives reported that their biggest challenge is getting their staff to use the systems

they had installed. 43 percent of respondents said they use less than half the functionality of

their existing system.”

The Good News is we can avoid such situations by following a strict roadmap for the

Implementation of a CRM for Individual Businesses. Following are the GOLDEN STEPS or

ROADMAP for successful implementation of a CRM

Explore Plan Configure Train Deploy


Travel CRM


The key steps before planning the implementation approach are:

Describe the existing business processes

Describe step-by-step activities of the personnel within the identified business processes

Describe information captured and used in the identified activities

Capture rules governing data processing and workflows between the staff

Capture statuses of documents and activities throughout their lifecycles

Evaluate performance of the activities and their bottlenecks.

Think of how the business processes could be streamlined to increase their

performance.

Make a decision about the processes which will stay manual

Document what tools are currently used to execute the business process

Think about transition requirements aimed to reduce impact on the business

CONCLUSION

Customized CRM is Productive, Beneficial and at the same helps in bringing out the best the

Business has to offer. But as all things in Life, implementation and proper planning is the

stepping stone for a successful implementation of the CRM.

travel crm research paper | roars technologies

Travel

crm travel industry

crm systems

crm today

businesscustomer relationship

customer preferences

customer business data

better customer service

travel crmconfidential