CORP 5061 CRM at the outpost Sheraton Hotels PDF

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CRM at the outpost These days, providing top-rate service means extending customer-relationship apps to wherever users are — be that a hotel off Highway 9 or a lending office on Route 12. By Ann Bednarz, Network World February 06, 2003 12:04 PM ET  

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"The check-in line was too long." "We didn't get enough towels." "This room is too close to the elevator."

The Sheraton way Bandwidth, thin or fat The Household approach Simplicity plus consistency

Complaints are a fact of life in the hospitality business. Hotels can't hope to satisfy all guests, during every moment of their stay. But a hotel can control how its employees handle guest requests, with the help of a CRM system. In the past, individual Sheraton hotels devised their own systems for dealing with complaints "including writing them down on the back of a napkin," says Kevin Vaughan, a senior vice president with the IT division at Sheraton's parent company, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, in White Plains, N.Y. Last year, Starwood decided to formalize the process. Using application server software from IBM and interactive client software from Nexaweb Technologies, the IT group built a Web-based application that logs and tracks guest problems throughout 200 Sheraton hotels in North America. The application gives Starwood new visibility into problems that guests experience. While Starwood had other corporate systems in place to collect and analyze transaction data and customer demographics, it was missing this piece of the CRM puzzle. Extending CRM to the farthest corners of the Sheraton properties lets Starwood witness even the most mundane customer requests and use the data to construct a chainwide view of customer satisfaction.

Similarly, financial services firm Household International decided to provide CRM applications at its outposts - 1,500 branch offices in 42 states where employees sell consumer mortgages, loans and credit products. To handle CRM at the branches, the company installed network gear from Vertical Networks that turned each branch into a call center, with advanced call routing, monitoring and reporting features. In both cases, IT executives undertook the CRM projects to meet corporate performanceimprovement objectives and to make life easier for employees working directly with customers. Success of CRM projects rests on the latter, experts say. CRM is known for being complex, expensive and often disappointing - a reputation earned in its early days when companies tried to overhaul massive customer systems in one fell swoop. Today, experts advocate short, focused CRM projects with clear objectives. AMR Research says companies that don't use CRM to boost productivity on day-to-day tasks "are constructing an expensive house of cards that will likely topple." Customer-focused initiatives are particularly important in a poor economy. "CRM is more crucial in times of weak spending, as companies need to find ways to attract and retain customers," says Kelly Spang Ferguson, analyst at Current Analysis.

The Sheraton way Starwood's customer-response system, called StarGuest, complements Sheraton's broader Service Promise program, which ensures guests a great stay or the hotel will make it up with a gift certificate, loyalty points or refund. Consistency is a key aspect of Sheraton's Service Promise program. If someone at a Sheraton hotel in Seattle receives a gift certificate after a poor experience with room service, Starwood wants the same reward system to be applied to similar situations in Boise, Boston, Baton Rouge and at every Sheraton in between. The Web-based StarGuest application is one means of enforcing consistency. If a guest registers a problem or complaint, a hotel staffer enters the information into StarGuest using a PC or mobile device. The system identifies fair compensation, based on preset conditions; alerts hotel employees with appropriate skills, via e-mail, to the tasks that need to be completed; and tracks the problem's resolution. Once a problem is resolved, a hotel employee closes the trouble ticket in the application.

For the hotels, the StarGuest application provides a way to expedite problem resolution and provides a tool for spotting problem areas. For example, an unusual number of housekeeping complaints concentrated on the 11th and 12th floors might indicate that a new staff member needs more training, Vaughan says. "Instead of finding out a month later when the property gets its customer-satisfaction scores, the manager has real-time data to look at and see what's going on," he says. A problem can be corrected before a guest leaves unhappy and more guests are affected. Using StarGuest's centralized reporting features, Starwood can spot trends and identify problems at a chainwide level. "If there are 15 or 20 hotels with recurring plumbing problems, that's something that might need to be addressed in the capital budget," Vaughan says. Technologically, the application's bandwidth-agnosticism is its beauty. Hotels that don't have broadband Internet access can use the application, as can employees equipped with wireless handheld devices. Unlike the case with many CRM applications, functionality isn't compromised. This is because of the Nexaweb Smart Client Platform, which sits on top of IBM's WebSphere application server, Vaughan says.

Sheraton—An Un-Branded Complaint Experience Posted by Sampson Lee on July 24, 2007

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Nowadays, many companies are putting priority on getting things right in the first time and at the first place. They hire the best possible people, put the best system in place, aiming to get the most beautiful satisfaction scores in their management report. This is particularly true for the servicing industries. However, in real life, things could go wrong and customers still complain. And this part of experience - the complaint experience actually creates much stronger impact on your brand than a normal service experience. Customers' emotional attachment is much much stronger and this eventually constitutes to their effective memories in an exceptionally powerful way. While companies are paying effort to derive an ideal Emotion Curve for a normal service experience, it is equally important (or even more justified) to design the Branded Complaint Experience, since it takes X times of effort and money to retain an existing customer than to acquire a new one, not to mention about the (positive or negative) word-of-mouth effect. If you have been following my articles or blogs, you may be aware that we hold CEM certificate training with our international partners in Singapore on a regular basis. In the past 18 months, we had four programs in Singapore and three out of the four were held in Sheraton Towers. Loyal customers, aren't we? The location is great, catering is fine, price is reasonable. I can’t tell what a Sheraton experience is until I get this one. This time, we went again. Meeting arrangement was fixed at ease but the first disappointment came on the room rate they quoted to us. The rate was 135% higher than the rate we got last time. We asked for the reason and were told there was a nation-wide convention during that period of sale so that’s the best they could offer. Aha... this should be one of the best practices for the hotel industry to send their business to someone else. We ended up booking through a travel site which offered 50% less of the hotel quoted rate. We got the booking confirmation and the hotel voucher, and we were mostly, satisfied. Consistent Experience: "This Is Our Hotel Policy!" But satisfaction ran too fast. We got problems right at the check-in--the front desk lady couldn’t find our booking. We presented them a valid hotel voucher, told them we were going to hold an event there in the next two days, have been a repeated event organizer to them for the third time... but none of these worked. The official answer was “We could still check you in, but as far as we didn’t have the booking on file, we have to charge you SGD440+++ per room night (regardless of what you have already paid to the agent)..., that’s the hotel policy and we are instructed by the management to do so”. Stunned. We have no choice but call in the Duty Manager. Mr. Duty Manager came with a cool face, insisted to explain the hotel policy instead of solving the problem. He recognized the name

of the travel agent on the voucher and admitted to receive booking orders from the agent on an on-going basis. In simple term, they are doing business with this travel agent. HOWEVER, he rejected to solve our case with them. In his words, the agent did not represent Sheraton and it’s none of Sheraton’s responsibility to sort out the case with them. That is a Sheraton experience. Now, let’s take a look on what Sheraton says in their hotel website: “Located in the heart of the city along Scotts Road, the Sheraton Towers Singapore is famous for our warm and accommodating service. We are happy to help you in any way possible and look forward to making your stay enjoyable and memorable.” "In Any Way Possible" Became "In No Way Possible". I called this an Un-Branded Experience—over-promise, under-deliver. The worst of all, the pain peak experience lies exactly on the company’s claimed brand values—warm and accommodating service, help you in any way possible. The Pleasure-Pain-Gap (PPG) is maximized in a very negative way, to the extreme that the pain peaks fall into the unacceptable level. These painful experience will also be deposited as Effective Memories and will be associated with the brand once recalled. In this case, there’s only one outcome—the customer is being driven away. Below is the emotion curve of my Un-Branded Complaint Experience in Sheraton. You will not want this to happen in your company, though.

E motion Curve--Un-Branded Complaint Experience of Sheraton How was my Sheraton experience ended? The case did resolve finally, after my colleague struggled on phone calls and emails with the travel agent and the travel site for another TWO days. After the case was solved, we did receive a phone message from another lady of Sheraton, claiming the case was resolved and we won’t be charged for anything extra, and please don’t be worry about that... By the time we checked out, we have never met with this Duty Manager or anyone from Sheraton management again. No goodbye, no genuine smile. Don’t ever think of an official apology on the whole case. Now, I can remember what a Sheraton experience is. Goodbye....