What is Customer Relationship Management all about

The phrase Customer Relationship Management evokes, what is to be said, a very sales heavy emotion in the mind of any reader. You can visualize a person on the phone with a customer, and trying to be overly friendly, polite and then trying to up-sell something. Others imagine a relationship manager at a bank or airlines who becomes un-cooperative when something goes wrong and tries to convince the customer that the fault lies with him/her and not the management of the company. What is your relationship with the brands you interact with? Does this sound similar? The ugly truth is that this has unfortunately become a given when it comes to Customer Relationship management.

But what is a relief, is that most of the major brands have already discovered this fallacy and are moving rapidly towards well designed customer relationship management programs and taking the help of technology to make it better. This gave birth to what is known as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems. There is no industry that is not dependent on management of customer relations, and the Travel and Tourism industry is no stranger to it anymore.

Customer services that require high involvement call for a well designed customer relationship programs. Management of customer data, to management of enquiries and of course mapping of customer interactions across all touch-points becomes imperative. What is more, today over 70% of the industries are using some form of technology to give a better customer experience (Source: Salesforce) Here are three rock solid reasons for adapting such systems:

Ignorance is NOT bliss – Do you know the reason for a customer to feel alienated from a brand? It is simply not being recognized. When a returning customer is interacting with an executive at the customer relations desk and they are treated as first-timers. Many bouncers at nightclubs lose their jobs because they cannot recognize celebrities simply because they do not know about them. Research and information about a customer is therefore very important. A CRM system can give employees customer information at their fingertips and allow them to give a better experience to the customer they interact with.

Choices and Preferences – Before the advent of such systems, it used to be the key relationship manager who had all customer information. What is the gap here? Once he/she left the organization, there was a huge chance that the new resource will have little or no information on the returning customer. Studies worldwide reveal that about 2 out of every 3 customer expects the company they are interacting with to understand their needs and expect a consistent experience but less than half the companies actually do it! CRM systems record previous customer interactions and this history allows a company to make informed decisions when handling a returning customer. In travel world, this will mean not asking for any information that was previously stored and analyzing the history to offer a more personalized customer experience.

Technology Convergence –We know that in this day and age, the average customer uses multiple touch points through technology to research and reach out to brands they wish to buy from. To be in the customer consideration set, all companies are vying for those few extra seconds in the personal space of a customer when he or she is browsing through the internet. Again, communication also happens across different mediums. A customer may first touch base on the website and drop a query and thereafter communicate via email and finally interact via Whatsapp messages. Customer information, thus, becomes scattered and hard to track. Customer Relationship Management systems are now becoming an omnichannel through which all customer interactions can be routed effectively and can be easily tracked. This in turn improves overall customer experience and make what is called the buyer’s journey, that much more pleasant.

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What if we told you that there is a travel solution with a simple interface which can help you keep your customer information at your fingertips, be accessible from anywhere and at anytime and help you create, customize, track and save all your travel business related data in a very easy way – Would that interest you?

Introducing the TourGenie Travel Management System, a brilliant solution tailored for travel agents of all sizes across the Eastern Himalayas to not just help organize your enquiry related work but also give you that extra boost to help you market your brand better to travelers directly.

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