Customer retention is one of the greatest concerns for any travel agency today. With growing competition, capturing new leads has become challenging as well as expensive. In fact, big surges in competition has narrowed down the scope for small and medium businesses significantly in the last couple of years. What then? Can we look beyond marketing, for ways to increase revenue without increasing expenditure? The answer is ‘customer retention’ and for that a Travel Agency CRM is required.
A research conducted by Bain & Company suggests that increasing customer retention rate by only 5% can increase your profit by 25% to 95%. Therefore it is no wonder that businesses that focus on customer retention as much as customer acquisition see much better life-time value for each of their customers.
Now, the question is how to improve your customer retention rate for your travel agency and how your CRM can help!
When it comes to travel industry, the quality of your service is everything. No matter how fierce your competition is or how many players are there in the market, creating an amazing travel experience will help you build a loyal customer base. And, a tailored CRM for travel agency can help you a great deal here.
Customer Experience is measured by the overall personal experience of your customer from the moment of first-contact till the end of the trip. This will alone decide how you fare compared to your rivals. It will be the difference for which the customer will come back to you. Travel Agency CRM lets you make this difference. How? By letting you manage everything in one place.
As a travel agent, you know there are a lot of variables that come into play for organizing a successful trip. From flight tickets, to hotel reservation to on-ground transportation; everything have to be managed properly; each time- every time. In fact, managing these aspects well is crucial for creating an amazing travel experience for your customers. And to do this effortlessly, you need a CRM system tailor made for travel industry. Putting in place a CRM system customized for travel agencies can help you in the following areas:
Establishing a great relationship via meaningful engagement is the foundation for brand loyalty. Here, ‘meaningful’ is the focus word. You may be sending 5 emails a week to a customer, but if those emails mean nothing and don’t add value, they have no significance at all. The customer must have emotional engagement with your messaging (irrespective of the channel) to foster brand loyalty. A Motista study, Leveraging the Value of Emotional Connection for Retailers says, consumers with an emotional connection to a brand have a 306% higher lifetime value, stay with a brand for an average of 5.1 years vs. 3.4 years, and will recommend brands at a much higher rate (71% vs. 45%). Socking, right?
In this age when average attention span is getting shorter and shorter, engaging emotionally is the only way to be remembered. And, believe it or not, a CRM can help you here! How?
Your travel agency CRM not only captures customers’ contact information; but also stores data such as their destination preferences, activity preferences, food preferences, birthdays, anniversaries and much more. When used properly these data can give you amazing insight into your customers. You can send out personalized tour suggestions, offer cool discounts as birthday gift or offer to tailor a super-romantic tour for their anniversaries. The possibility is endless here!
The key here is to mine the CRM data properly and engage your customers with personalized messages. And the great thing is, a lot of these tasks can be automatized! Be it sending an amazing birthday offer (coupled with an e-card maybe) or sending tailored activities suggestions, a CRM system customized for travel agencies will let you do it all with minimal manual intervention.
A CRM is not just a tool to manage your sales cycle. While it is of course the primary task, when used properly, a CRM can help you foster a stronger customer relationship and ensure better retention. So, if you are already using a CRM system, it is time to leverage its full potential. If not, NOW will be a great time implement the CRM and kick start your business growth.
Whether you want to implement the travel agency CRM or want to leverage your existing CRM to its full potential, our experts are always happy to help you out. Click Here to know more about our Travel Agency CRM.