Hotel systems hold a wealth of information, but the key to making data actionable is through technology integrations. In a cohesive universe, all guest touch points are gathered in one place, providing hotels with a holistic view of guests and ending data silos. We sat down with Piers Hughes, Chief Information Officer at Cendyn, to talk about why integration is so important in today’s data-driven hotel environment.
We’re seeing more and more customers with greater numbers of integrations per solution. If you look at hotel data systems, each handles a different aspect of the business and typically few if any of them share data. There’s no common interface to represent the guest and their interactions with the hotel. You have systems that don’t play well together, but they’re collecting a lot of data about guest behavior and preferences. At Cendyn, we look at the entities and consolidate them into structures that we think are critical to a good hotel interaction. Inside the Cendyn world, we offer a single, consistent way to get all that data, report on it and act on it. We bring everything together and fill in the gaps.
Hotels have a difficult time coming up with a single representation of a guest. They haven’t joined together all the slivers of guest data in the various systems. Which means the quality of service goes down, marketing suffers and guest retention plummets. A CRM is the glue that joins together all the data systems, cleans the data and pushes it back out in a consistent matter across platforms so it can be used effectively in customer retention and marketing programs.How can you vet a vendor’s technology integration capability?
Hotels should ask vendors a series of important questions, like: Can you provide data cleansing and a de-dupe process? Can you update and improve the data in the PMS? Can you provide real-time access at various touch points? For example, phone integration and CRM data. Or front desk, can you look at the full history of the guest as you’re checking them in? At Cendyn, we have a very flexible, configurable and modular integration platform which lets us integrate very quickly with any system. We can get data reporting up and running in 48 hours. In fact, Cendyn is the most integrated CRM in the hospitality industry with over 145 connections.What follows a good hotel technology integration?
Hotels can get out of the grind of dealing with bad data and start moving forward with planning goals. With a good integration, you can make use of your data. The sky’s the limit. If you need some guidance in forming those goals, Cendyn has teams to help you do just that. Cendyn doesn’t just provide a tool—we’re your partner in making great things happen.Cendyn is the most integrated CRM in the hospitality industry. We welcome an opportunity to demonstrate how Cendyn could transform your business. Contact us today for a personalized demo.