Choosing the right CRM software for your hotel or group

One of the most important decisions you will make as a hotelier is which technology vendors to partner with. While there are plenty of great technology companies out there servicing the hospitality industry, you need to ask the right questions and do your due diligence to ensure you’re selecting the best vendors for your hotel. 

Finding the best Hotel CRM vendor is especially important because guest data is one of your hotel’s most valuable assets. The right CRM will provide you with an always up-to-date blueprint of your customer base so you can market more effectively. In an industry where intermediaries such as OTAs take a large cut of profits, managing your hotel’s guest data well can help you exceed your revenue goals, even with today’s smaller marketing budgets.

In this article, we share five things you should look for in a CRM partner to ensure you can leverage your customer data in a way that helps you drive revenue.

Built for Hotels 

Solutions for email marketing have exploded in the last decade, with brands such as Hubspot and MailChimp becoming household names. But before you ask your non-hotelier friends for recommendations or google ‘best CRM’, it’s important to consider the specific marketing needs of your hotel.

Building a CRM for hotels is very different from building a CRM for an insurance business. You need to find a CRM partner that understands the unique needs of hotels and how they are structured and operate. For example, your property might have its own marketing manager sending out property-level promotions. But, the brand or management group might also want access to your guest database for brand-level campaigns. Or, the brand might have goals around database growth that you need to meet. Being able to provide the right people in the hotel with access to the right data and reports is incredibly important, especially given today’s tough data privacy rules. 

Another reason you will want to look for a hotel-specific CRM has to do with attribution reporting. Effectively attributing revenue to marketing can be extremely difficult. Using generic tools can leave you blind in determining the success of your email marketing efforts.  Hospitality-specific solutions change this by pairing emails with guest reservations to attribute revenue correctly

Of hospitality specific CRMs, only Revinate Hotel CRM gives hoteliers a central system that identifies loyal guests and other insights across all hotels in the group. Revinate also provides the permissions and controls necessary to ensure that data is accessible by those that need it but not by those that don’t.

In addition, Revinate’s Guest Data Platform brings together all hotels’ performance data across guest feedback and guest marketing into one platform. As a result, corporate leaders don’t have to attempt the impossible task of integrating different data from different systems to try to make sense of it. That’s an unwieldy nightmare and a huge suck on resources. But as technologists and data lovers, it’s where we excel. 

Integration Experts

It’s no surprise that most email solutions can’t integrate with your PMS. Hospitality software tends to be closed off and isolated from most of the tech world. But without access

to your guest database, PMS  fields, or guest journey, it’s impossible to create automated and smartly-segmented campaigns that are relevant for hospitality. In addition, without the ability to suppress recipients, like guests with future stays, you will most likely create a few customer service headaches for you and your team.

Furthermore, proper segmentation is critical for hotels to implement successful email campaigns. Without accessing guest profiles and reservation data, it’s impossible to connect with guests on a personal level. Hospitality-specific solutions empower hotel marketers to actively change the way they connect with guests.

The bottom line is that today, technology platforms need to work together. This is especially true in the hospitality industry because data is collected by different systems throughout the guest journey. For a CRM to be effective, it must integrate with the PMS and ingest all the data that is available. The more data that your CRM can ingest, the better your segmentation and personalization will be.

With Revinate, our extensive PMS integrations save you time and money. Integrating your PMS and CRM will ensure that you understand your guests, no matter which PMS you use. Revinate currently offers integrations with more than 75 PMSs, ensuring a quick and easy set-up and launch.

Legacy Data Pros

We know that you have been building and managing your guest database for many years. The data might be hard to access or be spread across multiple systems but it’s worth fighting for. We get it. We don’t want you to lose any data in the transition to a new CRM.

Revinate treats your existing guest data with kid gloves. With Revinate, hotels can keep all their historic data and use it to segment campaigns, drive bookings and reward loyalty. 

Data Cleaning Powerhouse 

One of the biggest problems around CRMs is data duplication. Having multiple profiles for the same person makes it hard to understand the true make-up of your customer-base. Your CRM should be constantly working to eliminate dupes in an effort to maintain the cleanest database possible. 

Revinate has developed technology, called Advanced Profile Synthesis, to keep data clean. Advanced Profile Synthesis is a highly sophisticated and effective AI and machine learning-powered process that automatically cleanses, deduplicates, synthesizes, and merges your guest data so that you can finally get a true and accurate view of your guests. As a result, you can more accurately segment your database and personalize messages to drive revenue.

Best-in-Class Support

Your hotel operates 24/7. Business hours don’t apply to you. We get that. When you encounter a problem or need help, you need it NOW, not in 48 hours. That’s why Revinate offers 24/7 support with a single point of contact and a robust, online helpdesk. We’ll be there when you need help. Guaranteed. In addition, we also provide guides, email examples and lots of best practices to ensure you continue to learn and grow with us.

Great support also means that you’ll be live quickly when you decide to partner with Revinate. Revinate understands the tax of implementing and launching new technology and knows many companies make promises they can’t keep. Revinate is different. We spend extra time and effort to make sure our software, in conjunction with our expert service team, can launch customers quickly. Revinate is easy to deploy and intuitive for any user, meaning that hotels are up and running fast, ensuring that you can experience the value and returns of our platform as quickly as possible.

Looking to learn more about Revinate’s CRM software for the hospitality industry? Revinate Hotel CRM was named 2019’s Top Rated Email Marketing and CRM Product by HotelTechAwards. Winners of these awards are selected based on key performance metrics, including product popularity, customer satisfaction, integration compatibility, customer support quality, and more.  Winning a HotelTechAward is the highest achievement in the hotel technology industry and to win it three years in a row, which we did, is a huge accomplishment.

Reach out to Revinate’s experts to learn more.