Centralize corporate room booking with CRM for hotels

A scattered sales structure can be a problem for a growing company. Salespeople might send numerous emails and attachments to their customers, but without a centralized CRM, there is no way of knowing what has been sent and to whom.

Challenge

Our client is a fast-growing hotel chain specializing in the corporate sector. Their customers are large organizations that book hotel rooms in large quantities.

Each site within the chain has its own sales team that works independently. Although the customer was already using Office 365, each salesperson used their own address book to capture and manage leads and customer contacts.

As a result, there was no automatic way to generate reports, so each salesperson had to create them manually, and the marketing team had no central customer contact database.

At times, multiple salespeople would lead negotiations with the same customer without knowing. Even worse, they would send competing offers. Additionally, relying on manual reporting led to inaccuracies that caused difficulties with forecasting and missed opportunities.

The client had set several goals for this project:

• To provide a single source of information on current and prospective customers.
• To improve communication, both company-wide and externally.
• To provide a clear way of qualifying the potential leads.
• To gain a reliable reporting functionality.
• To implement a service that is safe, scalable, and adaptable to the business requirements of a fast-growing enterprise.

Solution

We recommended a dedicated Microsoft solution, Dynamics 365 for Hospitality. The project began with workshops with key stakeholders and end-users to determine their specific business needs. We then designed the solution to their requirements. Finally, we implemented and provided support and troubleshooting during the deployment phase.

The main aspects of implementation included migrating the list of sites into the CRM, configuring parameters like customized price lists and seasonal discounts, and training the sales force on how to use the service.

Results

Dynamics 365 for Hospitality provides a single view and source of truth of all required data. A consolidated and shared contact list means a clear view of outgoing communications.

The sales teams can now avoid sending competing offers to the same customers. Not to mention, the marketing team can finally generate centralized contact lists for marketing.

The Price List module automatically generates offers and contracts, saving time and increasing accuracy. The customer now stores all documentation, along with version history in the cloud, allowing for an easy view of current negotiations.

Ongoing monitoring of contract fulfillment means the sales teams can monitor room usage against the contract. In cases where usage is low, sales can inform the customers in advance and discuss their agreements as needed.