CRM at the outpost

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

"The check-in line was too long."

"We didn't get enough towels."

"This room is too close to the elevator."

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 performance-improvement 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.