Navigating the challenges of integrating hospitality CRM and booking systems
If your current business goals involve improving customer loyalty and increasing revenue, then you need to make sure your tech stack works together to deliver the most efficient and enjoyable experience for your customers. One area you might want to invest some time into streamlining your booking and CRM processes.
In today’s competitive landscape, customer loyalty is crucial for driving success and increasing revenue. Here at Access Hospitality, we help customers combine and integrate their tech to create the most cost-effective and streamlined business solutions. With our experience in integrated hospitality CRM and hospitality booking software, we certainly know a thing or two about tech integrations and the common challenges that crop up.
In this article, we will explore the benefits of integrated booking and CRM software and how businesses can overcome common integration challenges.
10 mins
Written by Jo Fontaine
Read more about CRM and booking system integration
- What is CRM and booking software integration?
- How does booking software integrate with the features of a hospitality CRM?
- What are the missed opportunities when your reservation system and hospitality CRM don’t talk to each other?
- Key challenges when integrating CRM and booking software?
- What are the benefits of integrated booking software and CRM for the hospitality industry?
What is CRM and booking software integration?
CRM and booking software integration is the process of combining customer relationship management (CRM) software and booking software to create a more cohesive and efficient system. The integration allows businesses in the hospitality industry to manage customer interactions and reservations in a more streamlined manner, resulting in improved customer experience and increased revenue.
With integrated booking and CRM software, customer data is shared between the two systems, allowing businesses to track customer interactions and booking history in one central location. This enables operators to provide more personalised and targeted marketing efforts and customer service, resulting in higher levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty.
CRM and booking software integration is a powerful solution for businesses in the hospitality industry and by combining the strengths of both systems, operators can provide a better customer experience, increase revenue and streamline operations.
How does booking software integrate with the features of a hospitality CRM?
Booking software integration with hospitality CRM enables businesses to capture and manage customer information more effectively.
- Capture booking information: When a customer makes a booking, the booking software captures their name, contact details, booking history, and preferences. This information is then automatically loaded into the hospitality CRM system, creating a comprehensive customer profile.
- Capturing customer preferences: By capturing customer preferences and other relevant information, the integrated system can provide valuable insights into customer behaviour and needs. This information can be used to segment customers into specific groups, tailoring marketing and engagement efforts to each group's unique needs and interests.
- Using data to personalise marketing efforts: With a complete view of customer interactions, businesses can use last visit history to prompt return visits and incentivise guests with personalised promotions, exclusive offers, and rewards points. The closed loop of promotion, booking, visit and return maximises the value from customers and provides an effective return on investment from customer attraction activities.
- Building a single customer view: The integration of booking software with hospitality CRM helps to build the single customer view which makes it easier to identify the important milestones in the customer lifecycle based on their behaviour and demographic attributes.
By leveraging the combined bookings, transactional, and marketing data, businesses can streamline their operations, improve customer loyalty and satisfaction, and increase revenue.
What are the missed opportunities when your reservation system and hospitality CRM don’t talk to each other?
When a reservation system and hospitality CRM do not communicate with each other, you may miss out on opportunities that can result in a loss in revenue and decreased customer satisfaction.
Here are some of the ways this can impact your business:
Missed enquires to conversions
If the reservation system has no direct lead management capabilities, this can make management of enquiries and converting them into bookings more challenging. The integration of Access Collins booking system and Acteol hospitality CRM makes it easier to allocate booking enquiries to specific teams and result in fewer missed opportunities for conversions.
Incomplete customer data leading to inefficient campaigns
When customer data is stored on two separate systems or when the systems are unable to communicate with each other, it can result in incomplete customer data, which can limit the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. Without valuable information such as customer behaviour, preferences, and booking history, campaigns may be inefficient, resulting in missed opportunities for revenue and growth.
Scaling your business becomes harder
Without an integrated system, businesses may have to transfer data between systems manually, which can result in errors, wasted time, and increased costs. As the number of enquiries grows, this manual process can become unmanageable, hindering the ability to scale the business efficiently.
Lack of personalised communications
Lack of integration can lead to missed opportunities for sending personalised communications to contacts based on their spending behaviour or product purchases. This can impact the ability to gather analytics from this data, which is essential for enhancing customer engagement and driving revenue. Additionally, businesses may miss out on the opportunity to tailor their communication to those who have recently booked or visited their venue.
Reporting inefficiencies
By integrating reservation systems and CRM, businesses can access a single source of customer data, providing valuable insights into customer behaviour, preferences and trends. This data can be used to make informed decisions to improve services and offerings. Without integration, businesses may miss out on these analytics, resulting in reporting inefficiencies and a lack of strategic direction.
Key challenges
Integrating CRM and booking software can present several challenges for businesses. Some of the key challenges include:
Cost
There can be several cost challenges when integrating CRM and booking systems.
There may be fees associated with integrating the two systems, such as development costs or licensing fees.
You can sometimes reduce these costs by finding a supplier who offers both products with a robust integration readily available and combined cost for the two products.
Once the integration is complete, ongoing maintenance and support costs may be necessary to ensure that the system remains up-to-date and continues to function as intended.
It is important to carefully evaluate the costs and benefits of your integrated solution at the outset to ensure it is a worthwhile investment for your business.
Time and resource
Getting your CRM and booking software integration set up might require extra time and planning.
Your chosen supplier should be able to help you understand the practicalities of setting up the integration, such as whether there will be any downtime and any data mapping that needs to be done to support the integration.
All these things require a time investment for your business, so you’ll want your chosen supplier to be able to realistically map out the onboarding period and how it might affect your business in the short term.
Software incompatibility
Many software providers in the hospitality industry offer integration between their CRM and booking software. However, the extent and quality of integration can vary between providers.
Some providers may offer basic integration, such as syncing customer information between systems, while others may offer more advanced integration that allows for deeper analysis of customer data and more personalised communication.
It is important to note that not all software providers may offer integration between their CRM and booking software. It is recommended that businesses do their research to find a provider that offers the level of integration they require to achieve their goals.
Additionally, some businesses may choose to use separate software providers for their CRM and booking software and may need to work with third-party developers or consultants to integrate the two systems.
Process adoption
Another onboarding challenge can be staff buy-in and training. Getting your teams to adopt new processes or software for CRM and bookings can be challenging in several ways. Many people get used to doing things a certain way and can be resistant to change – so, including your staff in the decision-making process and communicating the benefits to them of upgrading or changing software is really helpful ahead of the integration.
You should also consider how much training your teams might need to get the most out of your system, without this your teams might not be able to take full advantage of the software’s features, which can limit its effectiveness. Comprehensive training, ongoing support and collecting staff feedback can all help with making sure your teams have a successful software adoption.
You can also help your teams by choosing software that is user-friendly and intuitive. You can get a feel for how teams respond to software by looking at customer testimonials, case studies and reviews.
Data privacy / security
Managing customer data securely between the CRM and booking systems requires careful consideration and planning to avoid data breaches or other security issues. You should ensure that your business complies with all data privacy laws, such as GDPR or CCPA, when storing and sharing customer data. When sharing data between two systems you should also clarify who owns the customer data as well as who has access to it. Establish clear policies and procedures for data access and use and provide training if necessary to ensure staff know how to comply with these policies.
Make sure that you have a good understanding of the data security measures that will be used by your chosen supplier during and after the integration. There might be a need to consider using encryption, firewalls and other security measures to protect customer data during integration.
You should also Implement strong user authentication and access controls to prevent unauthorized access to customer data. Use multi-factor authentication and role-based access controls to limit access to sensitive data.
What are the benefits of integrated booking software and CRM for the hospitality industry?
There are many significant benefits to your hospitality business in integrated booking and CRM software, here we explore five of the key areas you can increase performance in your business:
Increased revenue
According to SEMrush, customer retention is crucial for driving revenue in the hospitality industry.
The probability of selling to an existing customer is between 60% and 70%, while the probability of selling to a new customer is only between 5% to 20%.
By using an integrated booking and CRM system to increase customer retention rates, businesses can generate more revenue from repeat visits without the need for expensive marketing campaigns aimed at acquiring new customers. This can lead to significant cost savings in the long run and contribute to the overall financial success of the business.
Increased customer database
CRM and booking software integration can help you build an increased customer database is that it provides businesses with a more comprehensive and accurate picture of their customers. By capturing customer data during the reservation process and feeding it into the CRM, businesses can create a centralised database of customer information that includes preferences, behaviours, and history. This allows for more targeted and personalised marketing campaigns, which can lead to higher engagement and conversion rates.
Furthermore, having a larger and more detailed customer database enables businesses to make data-driven decisions about their services and offerings. By analysing customer behaviour and preferences, businesses can identify trends and opportunities for improvement, which can ultimately lead to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Better visibility of customer data
Having better visibility of customer data is that it allows hospitality businesses to gain valuable insights into their customer's behaviour, preferences, and booking history. By integrating the CRM and booking software, businesses can easily match transactions with customer contacts, enabling them to track their customers' buying habits and preferences.
This insight can then be used to improve the overall customer experience, with businesses able to personalise their offerings based on the data collected. It can also help businesses make data-driven decisions, such as identifying their most valuable customers, the most popular services, and the most profitable periods.
Recapturing customers for repeat revenue
Recapturing customers for repeat revenue is a crucial factor for the sustainability and growth of a hospitality business. An integrated CRM and booking software can help achieve this by creating a closed loop of promotion, booking, visit, and return, which maximises the value of customers against the competition and provides a more effective return on investment from customer attraction activities.
By using a booking platform like Access Collins, customer data can be captured and fed into the CRM, allowing for the creation of targeted and personalised communication campaigns to engage customers and encourage them to return. The real-time availability of Access Collins data allows for the delivery of the right message at the right time, increasing the likelihood of successful customer engagement.
Additionally, Collins booking data can provide valuable insights into customer behaviour, preferences, and trends, which can be used in Access Acteol CRM for segmentation and data-driven decision making. By analysing the who, what, and when questions from the booking data, businesses can identify patterns and make informed decisions on how to recapture customers for repeat revenue.
Saving time with automated processes
By integrating CRM and booking software, customer data can be captured and used to automate personalised email campaigns and promotions, which can save a lot of time for the marketing team. This automation reduces the need for manual data entry and removes the risk of data entry errors.
Furthermore, automated processes such as reservation confirmations and follow-ups can be easily set up, saving the team time and ensuring that customers receive timely and relevant communications. By reducing the manual workload, businesses can focus on delivering exceptional customer experiences and improving overall operations. This, in turn, can lead to increased revenue and customer loyalty.
Summary
Integrating your hospitality CRM and booking systems is a critical step to building a loyal customer base and increasing revenue in the competitive hospitality industry. In this article we’ve looked at the importance of understanding what CRM and booking software integration means, how booking software integrates with the features of hospitality CRM and how your business could be impacted by not looking into the integration of these two integral software tools.
The information in this article should help you identify and get out ahead of any potential challenges when it comes to integrating CRM and booking software and make sure you ask the right questions to your chosen software supplier.
Get started with Access Loyalty Builder
Access Acteol and Collins integrated systems offer a powerful solution to businesses in the hospitality industry, providing a seamless integration between customer relationship management (CRM) and booking systems.
With Collins' booking system and Acteol's CRM, businesses can capture and manage customer data to create targeted and personalised marketing campaigns that increase customer retention and drive revenue.
To guide businesses through the process of integrating these systems, the Access Group team provides expert support and guidance. They offer a range of tools and services, including a dedicated onboarding team, to help businesses seamlessly integrate their systems and start seeing the benefits of an integrated approach.
Get in touch with Access Group team today to learn more about how they can guide you through the system integration process
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