Best CRM software for the hospitality industry

How does your business benefit from hospitality CRM software?

In the dynamic hospitality landscape, exceptional guest experiences and streamlined operations are crucial. Hotel CRM software emerges as a potent tool offering 10 vital benefits.

1. Enhance prospecting

CRMs can enhance prospecting with lead segmentation based on behavior, interest, and location, enhancing prospecting opportunities. Integrated chatbots and predictive lead scoring improve lead quality, engagement, and conversion.

2. Focussed efforts

Leverage AI-driven insights and improve sales management with features that allow us to visually track and manage deals, optimizing pipeline progression, profitability, and resource allocation.

3. Accelerate customer response

CRM-powered chatbots can help to offer swift responses by automating query redirection and assigning leads to specific reps, minimizing response time and improving customer engagement.

4. Enhance conversion rate

Enhance conversion rates by leveraging CRM to track prospect behavior, identify drop-off points, and optimize the sales funnel for a more engaging website experience that drives higher conversions.

5. Boost revenue

Boost revenue by strategically upselling and cross-selling to existing customers. Utilize CRM insights into customer behaviors and interactions to identify prime opportunities for offering relevant upgrades and additions.

6. Elevate customer satisfaction

CRM ensures consistent access to prospect data, customer interactions, and historical behavior, fostering a cohesive brand experience.

7. Personalized marketing campaigns

Hotel CRM software enables personalized experiences and helps create customized campaigns and promotions.

8. Streamlined reservation management

Efficiently manages guest reservations and occupancy with automation and enhances the overall booking experience.

9. Guest feedback and improvement

CRM facilitates the collection of guest feedback and identifies areas for improvement.

10. Competitive advantage

Utilizing hotel CRM software, gain a competitive advantage by positioning your hotel ahead of competitors by providing a seamless guest experience and earning positive reviews.

How to choose the best hotel CRM software?

In the competitive landscape of the hospitality industry, building and maintaining strong relationships with guests and guest satisfaction is paramount to success. This is where robust hospitality CRM software tailored for hotels can make a significant difference. With various options available, choosing which CRM solution aligns best with your hotel's unique needs is crucial. In this section, we'll explore the key factors to consider when selecting the ideal hotel CRM software.

1. Seamlessly store and manage guest information

The heart of any hotel's success lies in its ability to understand and cater to guests' preferences. A holistic sales CRM softwareshould facilitate the collection, organization, and easy access to guest information. Look for a CRM that stores basic contact details and tracks preferences, past stays, dietary restrictions, and other personalized data. This wealth of information enables hotels to create tailored experiences that leave a lasting impression.

2. Cross-channel communication with potential guests

Effective communication with potential guests is a cornerstone of successful guest engagement. Choose a CRM that integrates seamlessly with various communication channels such as email, social media, and chat. This ensures you can interact with potential guests where they are most comfortable, nurturing relationships from the beginning and increasing conversion chances.

3. Easy-to-use analytics dashboard

Data-driven decisions are the bedrock of hospitality excellence. A robust CRM should provide an intuitive analytics dashboard that offers insights into guest behavior, booking trends, revenue forecasts, and more. Visualizing and analyzing data empowers hoteliers to tailor their services, improve guest experiences, and optimize revenue strategies effectively.

4. Staff collaboration

Hotels operate as a well-orchestrated team, with various departments working cohesively. The right CRM should promote internal collaboration by allowing staff members from different departments to access and update guest information in real time. This enables the entire team to provide consistent and personalized service, creating a seamless experience for the guest.

5. Escalation management

Addressing guest concerns swiftly and effectively is crucial for maintaining guest satisfaction. A comprehensive CRM system should feature escalation management tools that allow staff to escalate and track guest issues until resolution. This feature streamlines turning a potentially negative experience into a positive one, fostering guest loyalty.

6. Data security

Handling sensitive guest information requires the utmost security. Choose a CRM prioritizing data security through encryption, access controls, and compliance with relevant industry standards. Ensuring the protection of guest data safeguards their privacy and maintains the hotel's reputation and credibility.

How much does hotel and hospitality CRM software cost?

CRM system costs can vary considerably based on various factors unique to your business, including your CRM provider and projected growth. For small businesses, costs might range from $12 to $20 per user per month, while mid-sized companies pay between $100 and $200. Larger businesses with over 100 employees may face $200 to $400 or more costs. However, these are rough estimates as the expense hinges on your chosen CRM system and required features.

With Freshsales, the pricing structure caters to businesses of all sizes. A free plan allows you to experience Freshsales without cost. Paid plans, including Growth, Pro, and Enterprise, provide increasing levels of features and automation, offering exceptional value for money. This scalability ensures businesses can access advanced tools as they grow, from visual pipelines to AI-powered insights, customization, and control. The best thing is that you can start with a free account and upgrade as your business grows.

How Freshsales can improve guest experience?

Automate manual tasks

With rising competition, customer acquisition is a struggle for hotels.

Among other things, they need to capture the details of all their potential customers across multiple channels to get more leads.

Updating these details manually using spreadsheets and other tools can lead to data fragmentation. 

Freshsales, the hospitality CRM, automatically captures hotel booking inquiries from live chat, email, and web forms and makes it available in a single screen.

The hotel CRM also:

• Auto-enriches each prospect's details from their social profiles

• Automatically assigns prospects to the right agent by resort location, preferences, etc., and alerts them via email

• Tracks and captures the prospect's activities on your website

• Uses scores based on buying signals to surface the best prospects to connect with

Your hospitality staff, more often than not, are overwhelmed with manual tasks such as adding guest details multiple times a day. Freshsales comes with Workflows that automate most manual tasks and help boost productivity.

Workflows activate a series of actions based on AND/OR conditions. Your staff can choose from an array of actions that should be performed, such as  - creating tasks, sending confirmation emails/SMSs, payment reminders, and updating guest details.

Freshsales also offers pre-designed workflow templates that your staff can pick from. 

Do all this and more with workflow automation 

Organize customer data with a Modern UI

Booking details may fall through the cracks or get lost in a maze of other data. With Freshsales, you can visualize and manage your contacts in a table, or Kanban view and work the way you like. Your hotel staff can access customer data, manage, and perform sales activities faster. 

With quick actions and easy access to customer data from one place, you can visualize where each contact stands and spot roadblocks, thus enhancing your team’s productivity and efficiency. You can track your contacts’ progress using drag-and-drop cards and group fields.

Learn more about Kanban views

Have personalized, relevant conversations

Knowing your customers is key to gaining their trust. Understanding their needs to improve their experience will help you earn their loyalty. Using AI-based contact scoring, you can identify contacts that are best suited for your business with the help of positive and negative scoring signals that you can set based on your ICP.

Freshsales provides a 360° view of your guest information. This includes their pageviews and interaction on your website, conversation history, and the sales activities performed by your agent — all in neat chronological order.

With the highlights card, you can get insights on modules or integrations. The summary section gives you key information on the contact. 

• Make and receive calls via the built-in phone feature on your mobile CRM, ensuring seamless communication with prospects and clients on the go.

• Create personalized email templates and send bulk emails from the CRM

• Get real-time email alerts on email opens and clicks

Learn more about sales engagement techniques

Keep your customers engaged

To keep your customers at the heart of your business, it's not just enough to manage them. You must also determine the most frequent and most valued customers, and foster better  relationships with them. An important value proposition for hospitality industries is turning one-time customers into repeat customers. Keep customers engaged with effective, personalized communication to improve customer retention. With Freshsales, your sales teams can send relevant messages to prospects based on their inquiries, preferences, and position in the buying cycle. 

• Automate all marketing communication based on prospect activities

• Send welcome emails to new guests, discount emails for a guest’s birthday, or an SMS for their anniversary

• Customize series of emails for prospects and convert leads to customers 

 Engage better with customers using sales sequences

Address queries faster

According to research by Accenture, 89% of customers get frustrated because they need to repeat their issues to multiple representatives. A hotel CRM software like Freshsales easily solves this problem by integrating it with customer support software. Your sales teams can address guests’ inquiries in the shortest time possible. 

• Allows sales and service teams to collaborate with each other

• Provides context for each customer’s query so you don’t have to start from scratch

• Respond faster to inquiries, thereby increasing guest satisfaction 

Understand more about customer support platform

Track metrics effectively 

Hotel CRM software can simplify complicated data into visual reports. You can see historic booking channels, lengths of stays, cancellation patterns, prices paid, etc., in different seasons. With a CRM like Freshsales, users can use out-of-the-box reports to stay on top of key sales metrics and team performance.

• Build reports faster using quick edits and widgets

• Drill down into booking data using filters on your reports page

• Export or schedule monthly reports directly with a single click

• Navigate between reports seamlessly and get the data you need

• Set up a sales report dashboard to view multiple reports on one screen 

Analyze sales metrics using sales reports