Customer Relationship Management is an old business. There are tons of CRM solutions, both generic and industry specific. Mobile development shop MConcierge has recently announced a new solution for CRM in the hospitality industry that they’re calling GRM: Guest Relationship Management. According to MConcierge, the point of GRM is to provide a top quality experience for guests that goes beyond just an average hotel stay. “Guests aren’t simply buying a room but an experience. By building more unique preferences the hotel brand can better customize the stay,” says Anthony Zebrowski-Rubin, CEO of MConcierge. “By building a profile of a guest based on onsite transactions, on and offsite interests, hotel preferences, and real time social profiled preferences contextualized to the type of property, the guest profile arms the hotel with information to action real positive communication with the guests.”
For the hotels, GRM incorporates online social profiling, a mobile loyalty program, and direct-to-consumer marketing. For the guests, GRM allows them to use the app to interact with the hotel — requesting wake up calls, asking concierge for recommendations, etc.
Here’s how GRM is supposed to work:
- Stage 1: A guest books with the hospitality brand. MConcierge’s software collects all “open graph” data from social media websites such as Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and Tripit. The data is fed into the GRM platform which groups, clusters and populates the data directly into the guest’s profile.
- Stage 2: The guest downloads the hospitality brand’s free mobile application onto their smartphone. The application rewards the guest for every activity performed using the mobile application with loyalty points for immediate on‐premise redemption.
- Stage 3: GRM communicates with the guest by personalized pre‐stay, on‐premise and post‐stay special offers. This reward program helps to increase client loyalty using customized customer campaigns while reducing room acquisition cost through a direct‐to‐client-booking engine.
It’ll be interesting to see if GRM improves the hotel experience for people. Maybe I’ve just been staying in the wrong hotels all this time. Actually, I’m sure that’s it.