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Dear Friends,

As we look back on a year filled with surprises, adventures, major developments, unexpected challenges, and enormous gratifications, we are keenly aware we wouldn’t be here without you, our clients, proteges, well wishers,  partners, supporters and friends.

Thank you for helping us learn and grow.

Here’s looking  forward to a wonderful and joyous 2012 together!

“Year’s end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us.”
~Hal Borlan”

Cheers from all of us at Dot Now Social

As we all know, Social CRM is the primary tool for organizations to engage with customers. There are some industries that need Social CRM more than others. One such industry is Hospitality.

In this blog post, you can expect answers to the following queries:

• What is the big deal with Social CRM in the Hospitality industry?
• Is Social CRM really effective and efficient?
• Who is doing it right?
• What kind of problems you might be facing when it comes to Social CRM?
• How to implement a Social CRM strategy in 7 steps?

The Hospitality industry offers a huge potential for Social CRM. The Hospitality industry thrives on two basic factors- Segmentation & Uniqueness. Apart from the regular promises of customer satisfaction, it is the Identity or rather the personality of the hotel that really matters. And not to forget the Stand-out factor, that every hotel has on offering, as compared to its competitors. All these factors contribute towards the building of trust and customer loyalty, and eventually prolonged profitability.

Most hotels spend heavily towards enhancing customer experiences through various marketing ploys. They offer loyalty programs and other exclusive benefits to capture the customer’s attention. But, these promotions tend to become heavy on their pockets. Hence, including Social CRM mechanism in their framework will see a significant cut-down in their costs and also lessen the outreach efforts thanks to social media’s targeted reach resulting in a win-win situation.

Taking a cue from other verticals, social media is slowly but steadily being employed by players from the Hospitality industry. The InterContinental Group of Hotels was one of the first players in this field, to have successfully adopted social media to boost sales. Hotel Westin Mindspace, Hyderabad has also started really well. But, by far the best that I’ve seen is Hotel Royal Plaza on Scotts, Singapore. It seems to be doing everything right.

As we know, the Hospitality industry is heavily dependent on Word-of-Mouth. It can benefit immensely from Social CRM which is nothing but an electronic version of Word-of-Mouth. Any amount of negative feedback from customers can act as a dampener and affect sales, and the brand itself.

Another area of concern in this industry is the lack of qualified social media personnel with Hotel management background. As per a recent research, some hotels have already started including knowledge of social media as a requirement into entry-level job roles, while most hotels have simply engaged a social media agency to carry out the task and rely on them to implement effective social media marketing strategies and Social CRM to manage guest reviews, measure results, engage and communicate effectively with potential customers through social media platforms and blogs.

Also, its important to understand that Social CRM is an extension of the traditional CRM concept of an organization

I’m also listing down a couple of steps to implement Social CRM

1. Listen to what people are talking about your brand.
2. Understand the social graph of your customers and see where they’re coming from.
3. Try to identify your most frequent/best customers from the graph and see if they’re active on Social media.
4. Set your goals and objectives from the above steps.
5. Establish processes and requirements to meet those objectives.
6. Put together a Social media plan based on your requirements and processes.
7. Review and execute. Repeat these steps time and again.

The key is really to listen to your customers and see how best you can use Social CRM in your setup.

Do share with us your experiences with respect to Social CRM & Social Media in this industry. Thanks

References:

• · Towards Social CRM in Travel & Hospitality, Congnizant 20-20 Insights, 2011
• 10 Steps to start implementing Social CRM, Hotel Marketing Argentina, 2011
• Airlines, Travel And Hospitality, Overtone

In our endeavor to explore all possible avenues where Social CRM could be applied in this series of blog posts, we start off with Social CRM in the Airlines industry’.

So, how’d it help the Airlines if they joined the Social Media bandwagon?

Well, following the basic principles of  Social Media which consists of communities and conversations, we can state that there are status updates, tweets, etc from passengers, doing the rounds that they are in a certain airline on the way to a certain destination, on so-and-so airways. They simply air feedback on social media platforms, describing their journeys, be it good or bad on that air carrier and the kind of service meted out to them and so on and so forth.

It is here that the airlines need to tap in and see how the customer experience has been. There are various tools on the internet to keep a track of all this chatter. Airlines need to get a team in place and monitor/listen to those conversations and make a note of all that. And also respond to queries and solve passenger grievances.

But, not every airline on the planet can do it right. It just takes some amount of effort and dedication from the airline.

In US, the twitter feed of Delta Airlines(@Delta) is very active as well as responsive. It asks it’s passengers to send in their Flight numbers to check if the Flight is on time/delayed and answers to queries along with offering apologies to unhappy passengers and more.

In India, Facebook and Twitter are being used pretty decently by Jet Airways(@jetairways) & Kingfisher Airlines (flykingfisher). They are doing their bit to get onto the bandwagon and explore other avenues with Social Media. I’m afraid the same cannot be said about the national carrier- Indian Airlines.

A couple of weeks back, severe snow and ice storms had hit the San Francisco,CA region and the customer care phone lines of United, Southwest and Delta Airlines observed a severe congestion. Travellers had to resort to Social Media platforms to know about their flight reservations and rebookings.

In late 2010, the Netherlands’ national carriers- KLM launched the KLM Surprise. It made use of Foursquare app. As soon the passengers checked-in using Foursquare, at the Amsterdam Airport, the KLM staff set out to gather their info from social media platforms. They chose a unique gift for the passenger,  located him/her in the terminal and delivered the surprise gift to them. This info was also shared on the Facebook page and Twitter accounts of KML.

Talk about Customer experience!

Remember, Business is all about forming and sustaining relationships. And, Social Media provides a fantastic platform to build these relationships.