Better customer service for hotel bookings with a centralised CRM

The challenge of decentralised communication

The client is a fast-growing hotel chain specialising in the corporate sector. Their customers are large organisations 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 Microsoft 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.

Streamlining processes and reporting

The client had set several goals about 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 reliable reporting functionality.
• To implement a service that is safe, scalable, and adaptable to the business requirements of a fast-growing enterprise.

SoftwareOne recommended Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Hospitality. The project began with workshops with key stakeholders and end-users to determine their specific business needs. SoftwareOne then not only designed the solution to their requirements but also 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 customised price lists and seasonal discounts, and training the sales force on how to use the service.