This document provides an overview of customer relationship management (CRM) and how it can benefit the travel industry. It discusses what CRM is, how it positively impacts businesses, and examples of CRM implementation features for travel companies, including campaign management, customer profiling, and mobile apps. The document stresses that customized CRM solutions are needed for individual business needs and processes. It also outlines best practices for successful CRM implementation through exploration, planning, configuration, training, and deployment.

1. Travel CRM
Research Analysis Report
Initial Release
Author: Shinod B.M
Date of Issue: 7 June 2013
Distribution: Rinkesh Shah
Roars Technologies Pvt Ltd
KINDLY ADHERE: This commercial statement of work is not to be shared with any employee of Roars except the
person who is sending this document or the person in CC of the email of this document.

2. TABLE OF CONTENTS
DOCUMENT OVERVIEW ........................................................................................ 3
WHAT IS CRM? ...................................................................................................... 3
POSITIVE EFFECTS OF TRAVEL CRM ....................................................................... 5
CRM TODAY! ......................................................................................................... 5
CUSTOMIZED SOLUTIONS ..................................................................................... 6
CRM & TRAVEL INDUSTRY ..................................................................................... 7
IMPLEMENTATION FEATURES ............................................................................... 8
TRAVEL CRM ON THE GO! – SMARTPHONE APPS ................................................12
PRECAUTIONS ......................................................................................................14
CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................15

3. Research Analysis Report
Travel CRM
DOCUMENT OVERVIEW
The Following document is a Research Analysis Report for the Travel Industry and its need for a
Customer Relationship Management System (CRM). It will cover why a CRM System is essential
and what benefits will it provide. The document will also provide information on what it takes
for a successful implementation of a CRM System.
WHAT IS CRM?
CRM is the abbreviation for customer relationship management. It entails all aspects of
interaction that a company has with its customer, whether it is sales or service-related. CRM is
often thought of as a business strategy that enables businesses to:

Understand the customer

Retain customers through better customer experience

Attract new customer

Win new clients and contracts
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4. Research Analysis Report
Travel CRM

Increase profitably

Decrease customer management costs
While the phrase customer relationship management is most commonly used to describe a
business-customer relationship, CRM systems are used in the same way to:

Manage Business Contacts

Clients

Contract Wins

Sales Leads.

Staff Access
Customer relationship management solutions provide you with the customer business data to
help you provide services or products that your customers wants, provide better customer
service, cross-sell and up sell more effectively, close deals, retain current customers and
understand who the customer is.
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5. Research Analysis Report
Travel CRM
POSITIVE EFFECTS OF TRAVEL CRM

Fast and flexible planning of contacts

Supports entire workflow

Increase your sales by running targeted promotions and communication campaigns
based on your customer preferences and past booking history

Optimize your customer’s interaction processes within your company’s marketing, sales
and service departments

Increase customer satisfaction

Decrease communication costs for customer relationship activities

Guarantee real time instant access to all business partner information from all locations
of your company at any time

Build long-lasting customer relationships due to a better understanding of customer
needs
CRM TODAY!
Technology and the Web has changed the way companies approach CRM strategies because
advances in technology have also changed consumer buying behaviour and offers new ways for
companies to communicate with customers and collect data about them. With each new
advance in technology -- especially the proliferation of self-service channels like the Web and
Smartphone -- customer relationships is being managed electronically.
Many aspects of CRM relies heavily on technology; however the strategies and processes of a
good CRM system will collect, manage and link information about the customer with the goal of
letting you market and sell services effectively.
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6. Research Analysis Report
Travel CRM
Organizations frequently looking for ways to personalize online experiences (a process also
referred to as mass customization) through tools such as help-desk software, email organizers
and different types of enterprise applications.
Many organizations turn to CRM software to help them manage their customer relationships.
CRM technology is offered on-premise, on-demand or through Software as a Service.
CUSTOMIZED SOLUTIONS
All the mentioned above CRMs provide a Ready Made solution. But the need of the hour is a
CUSTOMIZED CRM SOLUTION. The reasons for it are very simple:

Exclusivity
Every company is different—so of course no two companies can have the same CRM
solution.

Business Logics
Customization isn’t just about data. What about logic: those all-important business
rules?
o Salespeople need to route orders
o Service agents need to validate customer entitlements
You’ll have dozens of business rules to add into your CRM app

Website Connectivity
CRM begins with your Web site: generating leads, delivering product information, and
servicing customers. With the Customized CRM, your CRM app and your Web site work
together seamlessly. Customer data captured on the Web flows right into your CRM app.
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7. Research Analysis Report
Travel CRM

Customization- all the Way
Although one CRM user may need access to a critical piece of data—let’s say her
commission—other users shouldn’t be allowed to see it. Customized CRM provides
granular security and sharing rules to let you decide which users see what information,
all the way down to the field level.
CRM & TRAVEL INDUSTRY
Travel Industry has varied fields and categories:

Tour Operators

Travel Agency

Travel Suppliers
A CRM for Travel Industry has main focus on optimizing the business processes of tourism
companies. As mentioned earlier each Business and Industry is Exclusive, so each has its own
CRM techniques.

Analyze - Analyze existing processes and jointly consider how to optimize them with the
help of the CRM.

Improve - As part of a business process analysis, we observe and improve your internal
workflow.

Reorganize - As a result of the reorganization, many of your internal processes will be
integrated and automated.

Productivity - This avoids errors and media breaks, cuts your process costs and shortens
response times when dealing with your customers and suppliers. In short: boosts your
productivity as a tour operator.
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8. Research Analysis Report
Travel CRM
IMPLEMENTATION FEATURES
Following is a list of Basic Features which can be implemented for a Travel Industry Business.
These are just a bird’s eye view and more detailed features can be implemented after a detailed
study of the Business Process.
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9. Research Analysis Report
Travel CRM

Campaign Management
o Versatile and extensive campaign management functionalities
o Direct and fast search and selection of customers
o Run standard, easy or expert campaigns
o Filter by distribution channels, characteristics and any field used in the customer
management profile

Conduct campaigns via e-mail, mail and surveys within minutes
o Classify your customers based on booking behavior, e.g. assign attributes based
on travel history, e.g. find all customers who have already traveled to Hawaii for
more than 5 times and assign these customers to Hawaii lovers

Web based software
o CRM Access will be available through the internet
o Uses only a web browser to access CRM on Distributed Hosting Environment or
deploy the CRM on your own server
o Make it accessible from any secure internet connection

Integration into your Website and Internet Booking Engine
o Easily connect your website or Internet Booking Engine to CRM
o Integrate your catalog ordering process
o Manage your newsletter subscriptions

Vouchers & Coupons Management
o Direct implementation of vouchers and coupons on the website
o Assign these vouchers to campaigns and link them for the customers
o Popularize vouchers and coupons for increasing sales and generate revenues.
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10. Research Analysis Report
Travel CRM

Travel Agency Partner Management
o Store and view contact information of agents and agencies
o Assign agent to your travel agency partner
o Visualize all travel agency partner’s interactions on one screen:

See all bookings made by partner

View and access all complaints with clients from this travel agency
partner

View amount of brochures ordered by this agency partner

View number of customers participating in campaigns
o Rate and accordingly manage the travel agencies based on customer reviews and
feedback.

Customer Profile Management
o Store and synchronize the data of all your contacts including direct customers,
travel agency partners, customers who came in via a travel agency, prospects
and your suppliers
o Store address, travel fellow, passport, member get member information and
much more
o Assign an agent to your customer
o Add characteristics to your contacts, get to know your contacts and use it when
you need it
o Collect additional data like language preference, newsletter bans and more
o Attach notes to your profiles to share with your colleagues
o Check for duplicates
o Store payment conditions and loyalty card information
o Visualize all client’s interactions on one screen:

Profile

Complaints
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11. Research Analysis Report
Travel CRM


Bookings
Company and Supplier Information Management
o Access and manage all company and supplier data
o Manage all contact persons

Complaint Management
o Manage any possible complaints about your bookings or services included in a
booking proactively
o Match complaint types to a customer, travel agency profile, booking and content
services
o Push back the complaint to your service provider and partners
o Propose and assign complaint and compensation type to rectify the situation
o Assign non-monetary reimbursements to your customers
o Deal in a professional manner with your customer by sending out statement
letters and compensation vouchers from your suppliers
o Store contact log
o Schedule activities to follow up on closing the process cycle
o Further the possibility of converting complaining clients into long term satisfied
clients

Statistics and Report Management
o Consolidated and up-to-date statistics and reports of customer and booking data
o Standard predefined reports of customer and booking statistics
o Multifaceted statistics, e.g. Top-Ten, customer rankings
o Export to MS Excel Format, CVS and more
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12. Research Analysis Report
Travel CRM
TRAVEL CRM on THE GO! – SMARTPHONE APPS
Today, the term App is firmly rooted in our language and has become a part of daily life. So
make your tourist software available as a mobile application as well?

Support your employees in their daily work

Offer your customers added value by letting them access the data quickly easily from
anywhere.

Benefits for Business
o Mobile data management — for immediate data availability in the system
o Control of internal processes through integrated task management
o Task assignment by the sales force on the go
o Greater sales potential thanks to the right information at the right time and the right
place

Benefits for Staff
o No elaborate printing of all customer information before the meeting
o Mobile navigation to the meeting point
o Allows spontaneous, unplanned calling on customers since all information
o Entering all information and notes right after the meeting, not later in the office
o Single source — a complete mobile office including telephone, email, navigation and
CRM

Benefits for Customers
o All your customers need to do to immediately have full access to their booking data
is to download and install the Small App.
o The app connects to the reservation system and downloads all the details of booked
travel plan.
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13. Research Analysis Report
Travel CRM
o This can be divided into following sections:

Before the journey

Upon arrival

During the stay

Upon departure

After returning
o Travelers can thus catch up on all the details of their booked services — anytime,
anywhere.
o An example for this could be a Google map can opens up directly from the booked
hotel services, showing the traveler the location of the hotel and how to get back. Or
the travelers
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14. Research Analysis Report
Travel CRM
PRECAUTIONS
WIKIPEDIA says “In 2003, a Gartner report estimated that more than $1 billion had been spent
on software that was not being used. According to KEN Insights, less than 40 percent of 1,275
participating companies had end-user adoption rates above 90 percent. Many corporations only
use CRM systems on a partial or fragmented basis. In a 2007 survey from the UK, four-fifths of
senior executives reported that their biggest challenge is getting their staff to use the systems
they had installed. 43 percent of respondents said they use less than half the functionality of
their existing system.”
The Good News is we can avoid such situations by following a strict roadmap for the
Implementation of a CRM for Individual Businesses. Following are the GOLDEN STEPS or
ROADMAP for successful implementation of a CRM
Explore
Plan
Configure
Train
Deploy
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15. Research Analysis Report
Travel CRM
The key steps before planning the implementation approach are:

Describe the existing business processes

Describe step-by-step activities of the personnel within the identified business processes

Describe information captured and used in the identified activities

Capture rules governing data processing and workflows between the staff

Capture statuses of documents and activities throughout their lifecycles

Evaluate performance of the activities and their bottlenecks.

Think of how the business processes could be streamlined to increase their
performance.

Make a decision about the processes which will stay manual

Document what tools are currently used to execute the business process

Think about transition requirements aimed to reduce impact on the business
CONCLUSION
Customized CRM is Productive, Beneficial and at the same helps in bringing out the best the
Business has to offer. But as all things in Life, implementation and proper planning is the
stepping stone for a successful implementation of the CRM.
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