Tourism is one of the sectors that have huge growth potential. The number of local as well as foreign tourists visiting various destinations in India has shown a significant increase since the last decade. The industry generates a considerable percentage of revenue for some states.
In this era of smart devices, travelers are price-sensitive, more aware, and expect enhanced experience while dealing with travel agencies. Thus, investing in new technology has become crucial for players. Offering enhanced personalized service and fulfilling client expectations is the need of the hour in this era of cut-throat competition. Unfortunately, several local players still rely on traditional operations management methods due to their unwillingness to adopt new solutions.
When it comes to the initial set of reasons behind lost sales and mistrust, human errors while making data entry in Excel sheet databases make it in the list of top five. Such errors can impact the agency’s credibility in the travel industry. Advanced customer service software eliminates the probability of such errors. Here’s how customer relationship management (CRM) systems designed for the tourism sector can prove to be a life-saver.
Customer Service With Advanced SCRM
A new city to explore with beautiful national parks, historical monuments, and other fabulous places to visit are factors that every tourist needs. Plus, good quality lodging and travel arrangements at affordable prices are a must.
Consumers can have complaints concerning the hotel’s Wi-Fi, room service, travel arrangement, etc. With SCRM, the agency can monitor, acknowledge these complaints, and share the same with the relevant partner for further action in a time-bound manner.
Handling dissatisfied customers can play a crucial role in the firm’s future. The customer service team with reliable tools can have the ability to turn an unhappy consumer into a loyal one or even an ambassador at a later stage.
A recent survey revealed that for companies that use CRM, the average return on their technology investment is $8.71 for each dollar spent. (Source: Nucleus Research)
Customer queries or complainants can be sorted and distributed based on their criticality, customer typology, support contract, and other criteria. Advanced tools like social CRM can help in integrating customer interactions from various contact channels like email, Facebook, Twitter, call center, and web forms. Teams managing customer service can access the history of interactions on a single screen. Customer requests received via Twitter DM or Facebook messenger can be answered using the same platform.
Even the firm’s knowledge base can be integrated with the CRM enabling executives to quickly handle general queries, complaints, bookings, and other requests.
Travelers often share their unpleasant as well as positive experiences on Twitter and Facebook these days. SCRM can be programmed to track complaints, comments mentioning the agency name. The feature helps in proactively offering solutions to unhappy consumers even if they have not tagged the brand in the conversation.
Put simply, the customer relationship system helps in creating a customer database, offers a glimpse into the consumer journey, and assists in ensuring a unified response to consumers on various engagement platforms.
Improves Responsiveness
SCRM’s built-in tools like natural language processing, text mining, machine learning, and sentiment analysis can help in detecting short and long term mood patterns after launching new travel packages.
Research has already proved that people read multiple online reviews before making any transactions on travel sites. Sentiment analysis function in social CRM eliminates the need to read or scan numerous blogs for hearing customer voices. The software analyzes online documents, forums, and posts in search of selected words, phrases. The customer service team can get alerts for extreme negative feedback posted by travelers, and the same can be attended quickly for controlling the damage.
Shaping Offers As Per Trends
Facebook and Instagram posts can influence people’s travel plans. SCRM’s analytical tools can help in studying trends and redesigning social media as well as email marketing campaigns. Targeting specific prospects as per their traveling habits and social media interactions also become easy.
Understanding the travelers’ behavioral pattern can help the firm in modifying their offerings according to the demand, ensuring a better ROI.
Agencies Facing Competition From Tech-startups
Travel agencies are facing a lot of competition due to websites that offer a comparison of hotel prices, travel deals, and other facilities for tourists. Travelers can compare prices and make bookings for hostels, resorts, hotels, restaurants, and even travel arrangements.
Rather than relying on travel agencies that use the old school systems for managing bookings and customer service, hotels around the world prefer using web-based solutions to reach travelers.
When it comes to hotel deals, one of the leading players, Trivago, alone offers travelers to choose between 605,000 hotels as per their location, price point, required services, and level of quality. These players have changed the dynamic of the tourism and hospitality industry. Their business models and huge investors give them the flexibility to offer services to users for free.
The same is the case with online ticketing platforms that accumulate data for best air, ship, and bus ticket deals as per the customer’s location. Thus, travel agencies have no other option but to upgrade their overall infrastructure and turn digital.
SCRM Integration With Enterprise Applications
Most of the transactions are performed using tablets and smartphones while on the go. New entrants in the travel industry are mostly tech-startups. Websites, apps, chatbots are the backbone of their business. Customers access these services via their smartphone apps.
For keeping up with the mobile-first demand from the emerging markets, travel agencies need websites and progressive web apps that can utilize the best smartphone resources. Social customer relationship management software can easily integrate with these and other third-party enterprise applications necessary to process bookings.
Such optimized booking management enables agencies to handle booking efficiently and respond to delays, cancellations, disruptions promptly.
A reliable CRM Software Development vendor can also help travel agencies to integrate existing booking systems with the social customer relationship system.
If you are searching for a software firm that offers custom CRM development services for players in the travel industry, you should get in touch with Smart Sight Innovations. The CRM development services firm has developed several web and mobile-app based solutions for the tourism industry players.
