Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has greatly penetrated the travel industry in the recent past. The travel industry is vast and complex in terms of its nature as it deals in services. It chiefly deals with human beings and their nature and there are several things that impact the industry inside out. Apart from various external factors, there are many internal factors of travel industry that impact the way things work. One important internal aspect is the customers. Tourism is a space where the demand and customer requirements differ from person to person.
The service expectations as well as delivery vary with every sale. In such a scenario, knowing their customers well becomes essential for the travel agents. And this is where customer relationship management comes into place. CRM has revolutionized the basic practices and principles of businesses involved in tourism industry in the recent past. From reaching out to customers with highly targeted promotions to collecting timely feedback, customer relationship management aids travel agents in connecting with their customers like never before. Customer is considered the king and the offerings are being customized according to customer preferences. Here are some ways in which Travel Agents can make use of CRM to better connect with their customers:
Grievance management
CRM has an important role to play in the management of feedback and complaints. Tourism industry has a high volume of customers, particularly during the peak season. It becomes difficult to manage the customers and their complaints individually.
CRM helps keeping a record of transactions, leads and grievances by customers in an effortless manner. It enables you to keep complete records of each and every complaint and the progress made towards its resolution.
Convenient access to the database
Customer database helps businesses to know the demographics, purchase behavior and interests of their customers. An efficient analysis of customer database helps tourism companies to understand the purchase patterns of a customer based upon which, promotional efforts can be customized. It particularly helps a lot in a highly dynamic industry like tourism where packages are customized according to customer demands. Customer database equips companies with a better understanding of their customers’ purchase behavior and it can aid them in providing customized offerings.
Picking out potential customers
Customer database helps companies in identifying the interests and purchase behavior of their customers which aids them in reaching out to potential customers. CRM has turned out to be an efficient way of converting the potential customers into real customers as it keeps a track of customer interests and helps businesses in not only retaining the current customers but also acquiring new ones. CRM provides an easy access to useful and relevant data, which saves a lot of time in taking advantage of the existing business opportunities.
Catalogue management
In the dynamic business environment, the changes in business offerings and their prices also change rapidly. Making the customers aware about the changes as soon as possible becomes essential and CRM helps in making the best of catalogue management.
CRM facilitates communication with the customers without any delay as it sends out notifications and updates to the relevant customers.
Facilitates Cross-Selling
Even the term Customer Relationship Management is a process in itself! While maintaining a strong relationship with your customer is essential for many business processes, it plays a huge role in cross selling. Cross selling is a term used for selling different set of services to the same customers again. As Pareto’s 80-20 rule suggests, 20% of customers are responsible for generating 80% of your business’s revenue.
An efficient CRM helps retaining your best customers by offering them the services and discounts according to their buying patterns. The cost involved in offering extra discounts to the existing customers and retaining them is insignificant as compared to the cost involved in acquiring and retaining new customers.
In a world that is facilitated by technology, the travel industry also needs to understand the changing patterns of customer relationship and adapt to the latest practices to connect with their customers like never before.
- Understanding customers need and requirements.
- Understanding nature of customer.
- Targeting audience.
- Customer satisfaction is the key for retaining the customer.
- Can get feedback from customers
- Increase the business.
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