An Introduction to

Social CRM for the

Travel Industry
A special report from Chess Media Group
and Hotel Marketing Strategies
Written by Jacob Morgan and Connie Chan, in collaboration with Josiah Mackenzie
January 2011

Chess Media Group http://www.ChessMediaGroup.com

Hotel Marketing Strategies http://www.HotelMarketingStrategies.com

What is Social CRM?

There isnt one single definition of social CRM. In fact, many people and companies
have their own ideas about what it is and how to best approach it.
Social CRM can be explained not as a discipline, but as a way in which to conduct your
business through new communication channels while keeping the customer needs,
wants and expectations as your focal point.
Organizations are faced with many of the same business problems today that they were
faced with last year and five
years ago. These same business
problems will continue to exist in
the future. What has changed is
consumer behavior, expectations,
demands, forms of
communication, and
technological fluency. Social
CRM is the strategy, process, and
approach for helping your
organization solve these business
problems within an environment
of changing consumer behaviors
and advances in
communications.
The goal of social CRM is to
leverage these new social and
collaborative technologies to help
solve customer facing business
problems.

Why Should the Travel Industry Care?

Travel has always been somewhat of a stressful activity. But with extreme weather
conditions affecting airplane, train and automobile travel, increased airport security
measures, and other factors, its no doubt that traveling is even more stressful in recent
years.
Its hard not to go a day without reading a customer lament on Twitter and Facebook
about a flight delay, a dirty hotel room, unfulfilled tour expectations, or a bad service
experience with an employee. Its enough to make many rethink their discretionary
travel in favor of a less mentally jarring leisure experiences.
Its not all bad, however. Many customers, on the other hand, share positive
experiences with their communities on the same social networking sites, happily
tweeting about a room upgrade, a pleasant flight attendant, a perfected executed
destination wedding and a successfully planned business convention, and more often
than not, acknowledging the business.
People are becoming increasingly more connected with their personal and professional
communities. They are using email, SMS, video, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and review
sites to share thoughts as well as collect information about brands, products, and
services.
This customer as curator trend obviously extends into the travel industry. People are
using the Internet, web 2.0 and mobile to tap into their network for peer-to-peer
references and reviews. Through the use of digital technologies, people now have
almost real-time access to their trusted peer groups to engage with during their
purchase decision-making processes.
Positive or negative, by listening to what people are saying about your brand and your
industry, and routing this social data through to the appropriate departments for
resolution or action, brands will expand their understanding of what people need, know
what people want, and customize their products and services accordingly. By meeting
peoples expectations, brands have the opportunity to improve the customer
experience, grow revenues, and increase their competitive advantage.

The Social Traveler

Travelers are a very tight knit community that are known for helping each other. You
dont need to look further than sites such as TripAdvisor, Couchsurfer, and AirBnB to
see this in action.
Review sites have become crucial for travelers to research vacation destinations,
hotels, cruise lines, airlines, restaurants, and other travel and tourism industries.
Oftentimes, when a traveler makes a purchase, the purchase itself is just the final step
in a process. The decision to purchase was made long before the customer pressed
the buy button. Travelers refer to the recommendations and comments left by peers
on review sites, blog posts, and social networks.
A Sheraton Hotels and Resorts study examining attitudes toward social media for
business and travel use shows that 21.9% of men use social networks multiple
times an hour while traveling, 34.4% say they do so throughout the day, and
14.1% say they do so once daily. This means that just over 70% of traveling
men check and connect with a social network at least once daily.
Women follow a similar pattern with 16.2% checking and using social networks
multiple times an hour while traveling, 27.9% throughout the day, and 30.9%
once daily. This means that 75% of women check and connect with a social
network at least once per day.
For both men and women, the largest age group that check social networks at
least once daily is 25-34 at 75%, however the 35-44 and 45-54 age groups do
not lag far behind at 70% each. This clearly shows that social networks and
social media are not just for the younger demographics.
Building a relationship with these travelers is imperative. It should not be a one-way
broadcast. The travel industry must recognize that the traveler is social and expects
brands to be listening to what they want, and to provide informational, supportive,
relevant, and valuable communications through their choice of communication
channels.

Abundance of Traveler Data

The result of all this sharing through social and mobile sites comes a massive influx of
data about your customers, your prospects, your competitors, and you. This data and
information is extremely valuable and can help your organization make business
decisions that affect your customers experience, your product, and your service.
This is especially important when trying to differentiate your brand or your product or
service. Lets say for example you are trying out a new scent that is being introduced
into a hotel lobby. Your customer might find that scent unpleasant or perhaps
overwhelming, causing them to move to another hotel. If you are operating a cruise
line, you may be able to boost sales during the slow season with special promotions
and deals that are catered to customer demands heard on the social web.
Travelers will give you data and information on everything from feedback about service,
to the quality of your food, your pricing, and their overall customer experience.
Moreover, your customers will also tell you what they are interested in while providing
quality information about themselves, in terms of what they want from you and how they
want to be communicated with, including their email address!
Location-Based Services Enable Extraordinary Experiences
Location-based services and the travel industry go hand in hand. Travelers frequently
use geo-social services to let their friends know their whereabouts. They tweet out
messages about flight delays and airport gates they are waiting at, check-in at hotels
they are staying at and restaurants they dining, or update their friends on their vacation
tours and activities.
Networks like Gowalla and Foursquare enable brands to monitor when fans and
followers are in close proximity, and to communicate with them online or through their
mobile devices. These technologies allow you to deliver exceptional service experience
to your customers at just the right time.
KLM Airlines recently experimented with an interesting campaign taking advantage of
this. The airline decided to use this multitude of available social data to surprise their
passengers waiting at Airport Amsterdam Schiphol with personalized gifts. KLM
monitored the social web for passengers that checked-in through Four Square or
Twitter. They then searched their social profiles for information such as their favorite
activity and interests to obtain gift ideas.

Then they set out to locate the passenger, either at their departure gate or again
through information shared through social networks. Through online conversations
about its brand, and based on data that passengers shared, KLM found the passengers
and surprised and delighted them with the personalized gifts.

The Wynn Las Vegas and Encore Hotels employ a similar approach to meet customer
needs and deliver better service. Jade Bailey, E-strategy Development Manger for the
hotels, makes sure that her staff greets and serves guests who check in on Foursquare
or tweet about being on the property. They also fill Foursquare with numerous tips
inside the hotel - using it as a tool to educate guests about the stories behind some of
the more elaborate interior decorations.
Rewarding customers is a key facet of location-based services. Offering virtual points,
badges and mayor ships, and gifts, deals, discounts and rewards incentivize travelers to
check-in at travel and hospitality venues. This translates into a mutually beneficial
exchange between traveler and brand, which is engaging and sustainable.

Customer Service, Support and Retention

The customer service economy is upon us, and will become the norm in the coming
years. In an industry as price-driven and customer-driven as travel, companies are
feeling an even greater need to strengthen customer relationships and maximize
customer retention. The social web has transformed the expectations of your
customers, and companies now have the opportunity to adapt to the social customers
changing expectations of a brand, drive customer trust and increase loyalty.
Companies can create a two-way dialogue with customers, using tools like Twitter,
Facebook and Yelp, and allow customers to share their experiences with a company
immediately after it happens and even while its happening. Identifying a customer
issues, responding to it, and solving the problem quickly using social media can provide
great customer experiences.
Competitive Advantage
Conversations between social customers are now at a tipping point for brands. The
time is now for companies to begin embracing the new social technologies and join the
customer communities that these technologies bring together.
Listening to customers, taking an active role in fulfilling their needs and wants,
personalizing products and services, delighting customers with unexpected rewards,
and nipping problems in the bud will give companies an edge over their competitors
who dont. The sooner you begin to really understand your communities, the sooner
you will begin to better serve your existing customers and gain new customers in more
cost-efficient ways. By consistently and continually meeting a customer's needs, a
company will reap the long-term benefits of customer retention: solid new relationships,
repeat business, and referrals.

How to Implement Social CRM

You were asked to develop a social CRM strategy. Where do you start? There is no
single correct answer to developing a Social CRM strategy, but there are basic
components that, if adhered to, will enable your success.

1) Start Listening
Listening to relevant conversations happening around your brand and products is the
first step. With or without you, customers are talking about your brand, sharing their
opinions, comments, complaints and kudos, and they expect you to be listening.
Its important not only to listen to your customers but also to your employees.
Customers will tell you what they want but it is your employees that are often the ones
to come up with the most creative and effective ways to fulfill customer expectations.
Satisfied and passionate employees can be the best people to engage with customers,
so its important to find these champions and advocates within your company.

2) Define Objectives
This should go without saying but often companies that are interested in social strategy
forget to consider the reasons for their involvement. The why behind a proper social
CRM campaign must be considered. For example, perhaps your organization is
interested in reaching a new demographic, or maybe you are looking to increase sales
or improve your customer loyalty program through social channels. Whatever it is your
trying to do through social channels, its important to understand why youre trying to do
it. Finally, organizations should ask themselves what value they are going to bring to
customers through social channels and what value customers are going to bring to the
company through social channels.
3) Select People
Once you identify the business objectives you want to meet, the next step is identifying
the right employees and customers that are going to help make that happen. Are there
a specific group of customers you are trying to reach? Who are those customers and
where do they exist? Internally, its important to understand which employees need to
be recruited to successfully accomplish these objectives. Is Bob, the SVP of Sales
someone that needs to oversee the initiative? What about Tom, the CMO? And Pat,
the CEO? Who will drive this initiative from a tactical and a strategic level?
4) Create Guidelines
If a customer says something offensive on your community page, what do you do? If
another customer is seeking support through Twitter, how do you address him?
Business rules and guidelines dictate which channels those interactions should take
place on and how employees should interact with customers. This is also the time to
think about metrics, data, and analytics. How is information going to be captured? How
will success be measured? What information does your organization want to track and
why?
5) Identify Communities
Your organization needs to think about the type of community it wants to build and what
the community is going to be used for. Is the community going to be built around a
product or service? Perhaps the community is going to be designed specifically for
support or customer ideation?
6) Select Technology
This includes everything from the social channels and community platforms to the
backend systems and integrations. This is definitely a more technical step to think
about as it revolves quite a bit around data and information. There is much data in the
social web so its important to understand how your organization is going to access to
that data and what it is going to do with it.
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Finally, this is also where your organization wants to think about community platforms,
monitoring tools, CRM systems, email marketing providers, and general technology
integrations. It helps to draw out a map or process diagram for how the information is
going to flow and which providers are going to be responsible for making that happen.
7) Begin Measurement
Tracking progress doesnt need to be rocket science. The challenge that most
organizations have is a lack of focus on measuring the important things. Measurement
needs to be tied directly to business objectives just like anything else. Organizations
also fall short around lack of technology integration, social media is treated like a
separate engagement silo. Instead, social media activity and customer data needs to
be integrated with back end systems such as CRM and tied into initiatives such as loyalty
programs to be able to paint a complete picture of how social customer engagement is
translated into business outcomes.

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Social Customer Engagement

Social customer engagement can be grouped into one of four scenarios. What are
these and what exactly do they mean?

The four scenarios consist of:

1. No Engagement
Companies may be actively educating themselves about social customer engagement.
Some organizations may just be in the listening/monitoring stage, collecting feedback
and research to help plan their social customer engagement strategy. We see pockets
of social experimentation on a select group of channels but there is no process or
infrastructure of any kind in place to support any type of a social customer strategy.

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2. Partial Engagement
Engagement with the customer is somewhat more active but an infrastructure and
strategic framework still does not exist here. In this scenario, departments within
organizations have difficulty agreeing on the value and the desired business outcomes
of social customer engagement. Turf wars usually arise here with departments vying for
control of this initiative to serve their own agendas or negotiating which department will
fund the efforts. At this stage, an organization is most likely using multiple or disjointed
CRM/technology solutions.
3. Modeled Engagement
In this scenario, the infrastructure for social customer engagement is almost fully
developed. The organization has developed and is implementing a strategic framework
for customer engagement. We begin to see a cross-functional effort - a big hurdle has
been overcome as most companies immediately defer to their marketing and/or PR
teams the moment they hear the word social. They are building brand awareness and
deep relationships with customers via social technologies. We begin to see more data
integration and process development. End-to-end customer experience management
processes are in place as are some data sets on the social customer.
4. Social Customer Engagement
Companies in this scenario have a very solid understanding of the social customer and
know how to deliver an exceptional customer experience that has beneficial value to
both the customer and the brand. They understand that we are now in a customer
driven economy, and have adapted to serve this new social customer. Companies are
collaborating externally with customers and internally with colleagues. An integrated
effort has blossomed with executive leadership, an evolved internal culture, defined
processes and guidelines, and the right technology are present across the company.

Whats Next?
Social customer engagement is new. There is no one universal approach that fits the
objectives of all companies in the travel and hospitality industry. As you embark on your
own social strategy, focus on listening, proactively reaching out to build relationships,
interacting and delivering an exceptional customer experience.
If you need help implementing a social strategy, call Jacob Morgan, Principal at Chess
Media Group: 818-442-3579 or email inquiries@chessmediagroup.com.

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About Us
Chess Media Group is a social business consultancy that focuses on developing Social
CRM, Enterprise 2.0, and social media strategies. We implement collaborative and
participatory solutions that strengthen business performance. By combining deep
industry knowledge, experience, expertise, and innovation, we design and implement
solutions that help our clients release their potential. As with chess, we understand that
in order to succeed, you cannot focus only on one particular part of the board while
ignoring the rest of the pieces that are in play. To become a social business, you must
have a clear strategy from the start, one that can be adapted, scaled and modified to
better manage the relationships with your internal and external communities.
About Jacob Morgan, Principal and co-Founder, Chess Media Group
Jacob is widely regarded as a thought leader in social business. He co-founded Chess
to help companies understand the business value of employee, partner, and customer
collaboration (Enterprise 2.0 and Social CRM). Jacob helps companies can boost
productivity, cut costs and foster business agility from their social business initiatives.
Jacobs book, Twittfaced Your Toolkit for Understanding and Maximizing Social Media
was entirely co-authored through online collaboration and demonstrates the power of
social media and online collaboration. Jacob's blog is ranked among the top 100 most
influential marketing blogs by AdAge; he contributes to publications like Marketing Profs
and the WSJ, among others. Prior to Chess, Jacob consulted on SEO and worked with
Adobe, Conde Nast, New Horizons Computer Learning Centers, Salesforce, and
Sandisk.
About Connie Chan, Principal and co-Founder, Chess Media Group
Connie is a senior marketer with 15 years of marketing, management and consulting
experience. She co-founded Chess to help companies unlock the full potential of
combining people, process and social technologies to achieve high business
performance. She has developed and implemented effective strategies, and delivered
integrated demand-generation campaigns that produced measurable value to clients.
She uses her extensive experience in traditional marketing to help clients to integrate
Web 2.0 strategies and traditional marketing. Prior to co-founding Chess Media Group,
Connie has been optimizing online and offline marketing communication and customer
service strategies for companies like Ivanhoe Cambridge and Rogers Communications
and for clients like McDonalds, Insurance Corporation of BC and Greyhound at DDB
Worldwide.

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