PREVIEW: Skift x Cendyn Report || Hotel CRM: Enhancing Guest Profles and Automating Communications || submit the information above to download the full report.

1. Skift + Cendyn/ONE Present:
special
report
Hotel CRM :
Enhancing Guest Profiles and
Automating Communications
+

3. SKIFT REPORT 2016
3
Data is driving the evolution of guest profiles and guest lifecycle models. As the
insights emerging from analytics technology give marketing and operations
a better understanding of guests’ behaviors and preferences, hotel bookings,
services, and ancillary outreach are poised to become more effective still.
Advancing far beyond the traditional name, address, and phone-number origins,
guest profiles under the lens of data analytics give hotel leadership the power to
look deeply into consumer characteristics and how they change over time — from
a single experience on-property to all the choices constituting an individual’s
preferences and propensities across months, years, and decades.
Analytics, when applied to an integration of all the data a hotel can access, are
poised to create outreach opportunities not only from on-site metrics, but also
by mining social media, hotel web channels, and other sources for actionable
insights. This newer, emergent understanding of the hotel guest becomes a single
version of truth — a more accurate portrait of the travel consumer across a wide
spectrum of activities.
Data is also redefining what a guest lifecycle model can represent, expanding
the concept from a focus on decisions and expenditures throughout a guest’s
single journey to one that encompasses even greater spans of time and activity.
This allows marketing and ops to analyze how consumers spend in numerous
environments and leverage this expanded milieu to identify new prospects.
Key to achieving these goals is the hotel’s ability to acquire new insights and
take efficient, streamlined action to reach guests when it identifies a close match
between individuals and offers. Automation is a major advantage in this respect.
From initial parsing to delivering actionable opportunities to then allowing
teams to execute on those opportunities and win conversions, data automation
is about taking guest intelligence — including enhanced profiles and expansive
guest lifecycles — and pushing those considerations to the frontline of hotel
communications. This strategy applies to numerous channels, including email,
customer relationship management systems, messaging platforms, and beyond.
If there are challenges in these developments, for hotels, they lie in how
quickly and effectively business leadership can adopt, execute, and track the
technology driving the change. Key solutions include practices and partnerships
that standardize datasets and generate accurate, actionable reports based on the
campaigns analytics fuel. Data-technology partnerships stand to open pathways
to access and implementation, however. From small and mid-sized organizations
to legacy brands, third-party solutions may well alleviate much of the burden that
comes with what are typically costly and time-consuming in-house build outs.
Executive summary

4. SKIFT REPORT 2016
4
About SkiftExecutive summary 3
Table of contents 4
Introduction: data, guest intelligence, and hotel communications 5
Guest intelligence: seeking a single truth-version in enhanced
guest profiles 7
Defining the enhanced profile
Reinvestigating the guest lifecycle
Automating communications: applying enhanced profiles to
marketing and ops 10
Empowering marketing and ops with dynamic
guest outreach
Measuring impacts, choosing metrics, finding
technology solutions
Insights and strategies 15
Executive Letter 16
Endnotes 17
Table of contents