Clement Gohin P2301/18/2011 ————————————————- Customer relationship management ————————————————- Assessment N°1 Word count: 2035 Lesson leader: Dan Bennett The customer relationship management is defined as a widely-implemented strategy for managing a company’s interactions with customers, clients and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes—principally sales activities.The relationship with child is defined as an important part of mistake made in hospitality business and is show as example of “unsolicited employee action” in the hospitality sectors by the international encyclopaedia of hospitality management (Abraham Pizam). “unsolicited employee action” is with”the customer needs failures” and to “the system failures” one of the three most important critical success factors. Customer relationship marketing has been focused on the business customers first, before being generalised for every adult.The customer relationship management has not to be only focus on the adults, to be perfect it has to satisfied children and their parents who will became in a near future the new customers. That is why we have to ask the question: So do we need to develop the children relationship marketing as a way to earn loyal customer for life or only as another guest? So to start to answer and to understand, we need to deal first about why it is important to see children relationship marketing as a possibility to develop a brand loyalty on a long scale.
Trip Advisor has announced the results of its annual family travel survey for 2010. 2% of travellers with children plan to take at least one family vacation this year. It is for the leisure business a huge part of their customers. And it is up from 88 % who did so last year, according to more than 1,100 U. S. travellers surveyed. So it is a growing market.
With the European nativity and the numbers of child per family decreasing quickly, more and more family are going to travel with them, for both abroad and domestic’s destinations. The 2010’s will maybe be the time of the spoiled kid travellers who enjoyed luxury holiday with their parents. 010 may also see a trend for travelling further abroad, with 33 % planning to take both domestic and international family trips, up 5%from last year.
It is literally a proof that one market already exist for the family and kids greetings. It is also a proof that family will spend more per children than in the past decade. We have also to be careful with new markets increasing tourism. The unique child culture in China and India brings also with the new tourism a new type of customer: extremely rich and spoiled children who will became customers for luxury hotel in the next decades.The question is: How we can use the children marketing and its original needs and approach to developed special relationship with kids? Originally ignored and later dismissed, the influence of children has been reassessed more recently (Haemoon Oh, Abraham Pizam 2008). With the exponentially increase of the competition between hotel chain, which started to become all globalized, the customer relationship marketing became an essential tool to stay competitive. But it is not enough original to be really differentiated from competitors for regular customers.That’s why hotel has to improve their relationship management on different and complementary segments.
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Swisshotel which is a brand of Fairmont hotels and resort has developed a kid’s friendly marketing strategy which won the international hospitality awards 2010 for Initiative in Client’s Experience. It is a concept which offers to the 2-17 years old customer segment a stay as memorable as their parents. The final goal for this luxury brand (own by Fairmont) is to become the leisure hotel for the group and be also really differentiated from Raffles and Fairmont.Nowadays the standard is not efficient as only differentiate point. Swisshotel has developed three types of package in function of age group: 0 to five years old (with: high chair, baby’s phone, children’s sheets, bath toys… ), 6 to 12 years (board game, Wii, energy drinks in the minibar, children magazines.
.. ) and for older teenagers 13 to 17 years old ( iPod station, choice of teenage DVD, books, teenage magazines…
). It has specific procedures to be followed by room and booking personnel. ntented to grow leisure occupancy, the offer generated 1700 nights in the first two month experience (HTR 2010). This experimentation which work very well as for result an globalize application which will start quickly for every swiss hotel trough the world. One child happy is always meaning two parents satisfied (Club Med advertisings baseline 2009).
Another example of children focusing marketing is the Club Med. The French resort company has been originally created for family holiday.Since a decade the company has changed its strategy to become the first luxury family resort and club. To develop perfectly this new concept the club med has created different clubs. The baby club (from 3 months to two years old ) is a nursery where qualified employees work as in a creche. The “petit club” from 2 to 4 years looks like a kinder garden and children going there for half or full day session. The mini club, made for children aged from 6 to 10 years old is a huge structure which greets the main group of children from the early morning to the night.For the young teenagers 11 to 13 a special area is defined where they can have autonomy with employees control.
Finally for teenagers from 14 to 17 years old, the last group of children is managed by one or two employees who take care of them and bring them to a teenage disco club or private theater. Actually each group has been segmented and defined by psychologists to perfectly match the needs of the family and the club med offers. The whole club med is dedicated to the family since a very long time compare to other hotel company.This differentiation had allowed the company to develop huge infrastructure to greet family in each hotel: as an example some have one swimming pool for young child, one for teenager and one for adult with of course a huge pool in common. Infrastructure are considerate has an important competitive advantage in the international competition for the family market.
But the most important aspect brings by Club Med is the on a long scale customer relationship management. Since more than fifty years the company has developed a special atmosphere trough the world which is unique.A huge quantity of regular Club Med’s customers is loyal to the brand since their childhood. It is one of the business key! Parent with high revenues brings children in holidays where everybody and everything makes kids relation as a priority. But thirty years after the children has become adult and wants to give the same things to their own child.
To conclude on this brand, the social reproduction which is quite high in France, bring to the Club clientele loyal to the death. To explain why it is extremely to deal about the club med in the customer relationship management, we have to explain which CRM is doing in this hotel chain.Each customer is called a GM, which mean “Nice member” and become a private member of the club. When a child started in the club, he will earn some price promotion and special offers as a loyal customer. In the other hands in flying companies you started to earn your “miles” quite late in your life, the Club Med has chosen to start from the birth. With this positioning, when a customer start to be able to travel in luxury hotel, he is already knows as a gold member and receive direct marketing from the brand. The kids are nowadays sensitive to this type of approach .We are moving into a new historical period[.
.. ]I have become a niche market consumer and my teenage kids are pushing the one to one approach (Boutillier 2000). It is extremely interesting to deal about how the hotel brand would be able to differentiate them in the customer relationship marketing and keep customer. We can think about the child care as a way to pre-empt loyal customer. Boutillier explain that trough the last decades marketing has become more and more individualistic and if we want to understand well what’s going to happen, we have to imagine how the marketing will become a one to one approach.To do this thing we have to compare the mass market marketing of our parents and the direct marketing done with us to see the scheme which will happened.
This new trends begin to be one of the fundamental approach to improve customer relationship for upper-scale and luxury hotels. To give another example of this new CRM which every leisure or family hotel should create, it is interested to deals about the new Parisian Palace the Royal Monceau. The Royal Monceau Hotel is a luxury hotel located in the Paris’s eighth arrondissement.
The hotel has 203 rooms and 45 suites that have been recently refurbished. To become different from the six other Parisian luxury hotels and to earn loyal customers in a competitive market the new establishment had created a Kid’s club named: “The royal Monceau’s small Kings”. It is a club for customer children devoted to art teaching and practising in the heart of the: “Art Hotel”.
Even a luxury hotel already differentiated from others competitors try to develop this trend today.So a lot of hotels brands have developed this new trend, but the most important question of this article is still why the second CRM : “Children relationship marketing” has to be done (and not only on resort brands) This type of children relationship began initially in airplanes business . The customer service team developed a new scheme when unaccompanied minors “UMMS” started to become more and more to travel. ”They often become bored and wandered in the airport” (Helen Peck 1999). So the flying companies started to adapt their service to this new type of customers.The First one British Airways created special lounge with toys, staff and TV to greet the children in 1982 to answer to its Baseline “the world favourite airline”.
As in any Business, when an improvement works well, competitors follows and copy the inventor. The “Umms “concept became something usual in airplane companies and as the yield management has done before, it has been adapted to hospitality service. We are right now only between the innovator stage and the early adopter stage, in the product life style management as defined by Everett Rogers.In CRM, the people in the front line should have the ability to communicate with the guests, adapt his dialogue and remember his contact history, and the most important understand customer issue. “The representative has the power to negotiate a new interesting service with the customer in an effort to pre-empted the customer’s loyalty “(Annekie Brink, Adele Berndt 2009). To develop a good customer service hotel brand should give a trainee to their greeting staff to correct this needs.
So as a complete part of the customer relationship management, employees should receive formation from their company to understand customers.Actually It looks quite normal for the customers who travel abroad to be completely understood by the local staff, who has to learn other languages and culture. But in fact it doesn’t look usual to have in hotel people able to serve children as other normal customers.
We have to wait some more years to really see if the children relationship marketing development is going to really become something inescapable or if it is just a trend as the Bidet used to be (apparently still in South American countries hotels).But for every father and mother trough the world I really hope this trend development. Nothing is more disappointing for customers than teenagers or young child gasping, screaming or wandering in the hotel when you have to stay and it get worst when it is your own child who are not correctly greet in the hotel. So as a conclusion, I really wish that the children relationship management will improve what it has to be improve for the good of all and the business competition. * Helen Peck , (1999); Relationship marketing strategy and implementation, Oxford, Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann, * DavidBowie,Francis Buttle (2004) ;Hospitality marketing: an introduction Oxford, UK Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann, * Haemoon Oh, Abraham Pizam (2008); International encyclopedia of hospitality management – Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann Oxford, UK * Reid, R.
and Bojanic, D. (2001); Hospitality Marketing Management, 3rd edn. New York: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 47–49. DAVID BOJANIC UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS, USA Critical success factors the critical success factor (CSF) * Bob Dickinson, Andrew Vladimir – (2004 ); Selling the sea: an inside look at the cruise industry ; Hoboken New Jersey; John Wiley and sons edition.
