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The travel and tourism industry is undergoing a huge transformation in the present business climate. With instant access to price comparison websites and travel forums, today’s travelers are more informed about different options, more price-sensitive and have higher expectations when it comes to customer service. As a result, travel businesses are facing more challenges in keeping up with the competition and meeting customer expectations.
One of the ways to meet these challenges and stay competitive in the over-saturated travel market is by implementing an efficient CRM solution. The CRM software provides the ability to increase your customer base, retain current clients, improve sales rates and enhance the quality of your customer service. On top of that, the platform puts the client at the center of all business operations. It allows your employees to personalize interactions with each customer, which eventually results in strong, loyal and long-term relationships.
What are the advantages of CRM for the travel and tourism industry?
Maintaining a consistent client database is not easy, especially when all the contact and lead data is scattered across multiple Excel spreadsheets. The reliable travel CRM solution provides the ability to keep track of all current and potential client data within one platform. It creates complete client profiles that include the contact details, budget, marital status, traveler preferences and interests, documents, and the history of previous trips. With such a holistic picture at hand, your employees will be able to personalize pre-sale and post-sale communications, make the right trip offers and better understand the travelers’ needs.
Regardless of the industry and size of your business, the importance of analytical data for company growth cannot be overestimated. It helps determine upcoming trends, assess company performance and see pain points of your business processes at their early stages. The right CRM solution can automate the generation of reports and provide you with valuable insights into the actual state of things in your travel agency. With in-depth stats, you will be able to determine the most yielding tours, predict future sales and trends, estimate current conversion rates and even evaluate the performance of each travel agent.
Routine, repetitive tasks are always stealing time from value-adding activities and draining employees’ energy. The CRM offers efficient workflow and BPM tools that streamline the management of routine business operations. With the help of these tools, the travel agency can automate the sending of emails and notifications to clients about scheduled hotel bookings, check-in and check-out reminders, flights, tour prices, etc. Aside from that, the platform enables the development of complex business processes that automate the creation of related records, scheduling calls and meetings, nurturing leads and updating records based on predefined criteria.
When it comes to the travel and tourism industry, document management is not something that can be taken lightly. The CRM solution eliminates the need to juggle between various folders to find the required paper and reduces the risks of losing an important document just before the start of a tour. It allows employees to upload and link documents to the relevant contact and lead records within the system. In addition, the software ensures that your documents are safe, providing the ability to limit and control employee access to travelers’ papers.
With the growth of your business, it may become more difficult to stay informed about all upcoming activities. Using the CRM software, the tedious process of planning the workday becomes a lot easier. It provides the ability to keep track of the nearing activities, sends reminders about the start of events to all attendees, and allows assigning tasks with deadlines to team members. In this way, the system ensures that no travel agent forgets about an important call or task.
Additionally, the CRM system will help keep in touch with your partners, which is crucial for every travel agency. The software enables prompt and efficient communication with airlines, hotels and tour guides by storing all of your company’s partner information in the perfectly organized database. On top of that, since CRM is mobile software, it gives you access to the most critical information on the go, enabling you to keep track of your business even when you’re out of the country.
To sum up, the travel and tourism sector has always been one of the most competitive. A scalable and robust CRM solution can be a real game-changer for your travel agency. Empowering your employees with efficient tools, the software will help to fully meet the demands of the market and exceed customer expectations.
Interested in making your business more efficient? Let’s do it together with EspoCRM!