Pranjal Prashar, Co-Founder & CEO, Xperium

Pranjal Prashar realized the Make it or Break it power of social media long before it became the buzzword. Since he loves to solve problems he focused on tackling the Break It power of social media. He sought not only to harness but also to profitably leverage this uncontrolled and unabashed power of social media. He did so by finding a solution for positive Online Reputation Management of the players in hospitality industry. And thus his idea of REPUP took shape. Pranjal founded PIQUOR Technologies and launched the product REPUP along with Vineet Chouhan in December 2014. At, 30 years of age and Pranjal is a founder and CEO of his successful CEM Company which is clocking a growth rate of 600% annually!

 

The pandemic has led technology to dramatically shift the way hotels engage with their customers. Using advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning has become the driving force in today’s world, culminating in the transformation of the hotel business through improved marketing efforts. As markets is slowly inching towards normalcy where hotels are currently having the opportunity to take control over their marketing that reducing their reliance on online travel agents (OTAs). 

According to the definition of AI in the Cambridge dictionary, it states, “Technology that allows something to be done in a way that is similar to the way humans do it” with “some of the qualities of the human mind.” Therefore artificial intelligence has limitless capacities which are making CRM technology more advanced and intelligent.  

Customer relationship management software today assists hotels in aggregating client preferences, keeping track of interactions across numerous touchpoints and crafting communications that connect at the individual level. A good CRM with AI/ML capabilities helps hoteliers to be cost-efficient in today’s extremely competitive business environment. In addition, technological advancements revolutionize and unlock new opportunities that tend to improve customer satisfaction and make hotels more efficient in the following ways.

Bringing new business using old data 

The hotel business witnessed its revival in three phases. Firstly by starting local guests use F&B and daycation/staycation packages, secondly by people taking short drivable distances for weekends or extended workstation and thirdly due to the domestic business and leisure travelers coming back to hotels. 

Therefore inculcating good CRM systems can help to target opportunity which helps in robust business growth. A quality CRM system can analyze historical data to segment local audiences, plan and execute email campaigns, SMS along WhatsApp campaigns for scaling up local audiences. Such campaigns generate 25-40 leads per 1L guest data leading to 15-24L of direct business opportunities every month without spending anything on social media or Google ads. Thus to bring additional business hotels can segment and create a targeted audience on various social media platforms.

Because of the Covid-19 pandemic traveling has been restricted hotels are focusing on guests that lobed with driving distances and offering staycation offers with flexible check-in and check-out times. Working professionals that are working from home are increasingly opting for daycation’s offer that allows them to stay at the hotels to work and relax at the same time. In addition, hotels with CRM have segmentation capabilities based on multiple guest data such as demographics, bookings, websites that able the process to be segmented smartly and immediately identify guest profiles and target them through SMS, WhatsApp, and email. 

To increase other revenue streams, hotels that had food and beverages units are able to market their restaurants by allowing guests that live within driving distances. Thus hotels can also use CRM data to build custom lookalike audiences, this further increases their reach to larger audiences that are relevant to their respective businesses. Similarly, audiences will have a higher ROI on marketing spend than any other targeting options on social media and search engines. 

The revenue increase from inhouse guests 

With the help of an AI-enabled CRM, platform hotels can identify their targets that will upsell/cross-sell offers that are relevant to the type of guest. The CRM platform also allows guests to go through multiple offers and promote the ones that are the best result for the respective guest according to their preferences and choices. Thus CRM players also equipped themselves to initiate service that will recover performance data on basis of review/feedback given by the guest during their respective stay-in. Also, a good CRM service will also be able to fragment, schedule, and send campaigns to the guest at different time intervals that will further generate more re-bookings. 

Similarly, CRM’s are also able to generate post-stay vouchers in the form of exciting offers like discounts, free meals, free-upgrade, etc. that can be redeemed during their upcoming next stay. These methods are used by hotels that have a larger hotel base in multiple regions as the cost of acquiring a new customer is huge and with the help of these strategies, hotels are able to retain their existing customers. We have seen good AI-based CRM implementation usually leads to revenue increase by 4-7%. The biggest benefit of employing an AI-enabled CRM platform is that the business gets to understand their customer preferences and capture the data and buying behavior pattern to fully customize the guest interaction and messaging approach.

In conclusion, Instead of relying entirely on OTAs and 3rd party vendors for business, hotels need to take control of their own revenue. Good AI-based CRM implementation will result in more repeat guests, additional revenue from existing guests, more conversions from hotel digital assets. CRM also enables hyper-personalised guest experience which leads to higher guest satisfaction and delight.

An AI-powered CRM service in the hotel industry will optimize all continuously in the real-time world with no manual Intervention resulting in hotels becoming cost-efficient and creating an automated conversation service driven by user preferences along with actual/ real-time interaction.

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