Understand your sales and marketing
Our focus for travel and leisure CRM is on group and individual travel, particularly with companies offering “learning outside of the classroom” experiences.
Before we go too far, you may ask why you need CRM in addition to your booking system – can’t all the data just be stored in your back office instead? It could be, but in order to improve your business you need to have a solid understanding of the relationship that exists between your marketing and your sales. A lot of this information is better contained within a system designed for this very purpose, rather than added to (what will rapidly become) a cluttered and disjointed booking system with irrelevant information stored inside.
So, what problems are you facing? You may be looking to understand your customers and find ways to up-sell and cross-sell to them in the future, through enhanced profiling and a greater understanding of buyer motives. You may have multiple brands talking to different groups, from schools to individuals. You may be trying to avoid these brands stealing business away from each other, or failing to communicate with each other as part of your larger organisation. You may be trying to find a way to keep accurate records of incidents to ensure your customer services and incident control are all operating at peak performance. Each of these are issues that are addressed by travel and leisure CRM systems. (As an aside, if you’re looking for ways to monitor your work with language students – you may wish to look at our dedicated page on Language Schools).
Let’s take a look at the fundamentals of travel and leisure CRM before we go too much further. We’d like to recommend that you take a look at The CRM eBook, a free, downloadable resource that outlines what makes a CRM system successful. Before you invest in a new system you should have a good idea of how you’re going to make it work. The CRM eBook will show you exactly that – what works, and what doesn’t in CRM.