Hospitality is all about providing your guests with experiences they won’t forget, especially when it comes to location and places to stay. Making your guests a priority will ensure all information is in-check and you have everything you need to provide quality services to fit their standards.  

Integrating your PMS and CRM will streamline interactions for you and your guests. Here are six ways integrating PMS and CRM can ensure great customer experiences: 

#1 Efficient Reservation Process 

Having an efficient way to communicate about reservations being made ensures excellent customer service to your guests. The Property Management System (PMS) will notify the CRM to maintain up-to-date procedures on cancellations and modified or confirmed reservations. Having these processes completed in real-time will prevent errors.  

#2 Personalized Customer Profiles  

Your guests’ interests, past stay history, room preferences, and loyalty program information help you understand the type of visit they hope to experience. Before your guests check in, this information can help your team prepare for their visit by using this basic information.  

Personalize customer experiences through:  

• Loyalty programs- Loyalty programs can help provide incentives for customers to stay with you. Advanced PMS systems track loyalty programs, but an integration with the CRM helps hotels act on that data. The CRM can trigger emails when a guest reaches a certain number of loyalty points in the PMS to encourage new bookings or other ways to redeem points.  
• Guest preferences- When the PMS and CRM work in silos, it is difficult to get a complete picture of guest profiles. Integrating the two shares preference information on room type, number of beds, and other special requests that make it easy to accommodate their needs upon arrival.  
• Messaging- Text and email reminders allow you to send automated messages right to your customers' phones. The PMS and CRM integration enable you to send personalized messages for each person’s stay, so the information is at their fingertips. 

#3 Capture Important Website Information 

A CRM helps you manage and track your leads from your website. It will become your go-to center for gathering your customer’s data. Integrating the CRM with your PMS reduces the need to manually edit fields in both systems by automatically filling the website data into the profiles. This will increase productivity overall. 

#4 Effectively Manage Opt-ins and Opt-outs  

Opt-ins and opt-outs provide clear communication with your team about how to manage contacts. When the PMS and CRM are integrated, it streamlines updates to these requests. If guests opt-out and the systems are disconnected, a member of your team must go into the PMS system and make a manual update to match the CRM.  

Sometimes, a guest will make their opt-in or opt-out request directly to a receptionist. In this case, he or she must go into both the CRM and PMS system to ensure each is updated with the new preference. If your PMS and CRM are synchronized however, it eliminates the need to unsubscribe guests manually in both systems, therefore reducing errors and making the process more efficient.  

#5 Remove Duplicate Profiles  

Minimizing duplicate entries as people book reservations on multiple platforms will help save their information correctly within your system. When a PMS system is separated from the CRM, duplicate information is harder to detect. For example, if a customer books a room on Expedia.com for one stay, but books directly through your website for another stay, the PMS believes there is no correlation between these two accounts, even though they are the same.  

A CRM can recognize these common data points and suggest merging the duplicate data into one profile. Not only is this helpful for tracking customer data at one hotel, but hotels that operate on multiple PMS systems can centralize inter-hotel customer tracking through the added CRM layer as well.   

#6 Personalize Marketing Communications  

The PMS will send the reservations right to your marketing systems based on your customer profiles. CRMs can gather richer customer data to target communications using more than just the reservation data. Guest preferences, spend history, and other insights pulled from the CRM can inform automated campaigns and trigger communications that customize experiences and strengthen your relationship with your guests.  

When the CRM is integrated with a PMS in real-time, live data from the PMS’ reservations will automatically be shared within the CRM so teams can provide communications that are highly targeted and personalized to each guest.  

Concluding Thoughts 

Integrating your PMS with your CRM fosters streamlined operations. The hospitality industry relies on technology to navigate data and provide exceptional services to elevate guest stays. Shared data between a CRM and PMS system enables more proactive automation and helps manage customer data with less friction. To learn more about how CRM can help organize your needs, visit our hospitality page.