HSMAI Arizona - Hospitality Sales and Marketing Association International, Arizona Chapter

Customer Intimacy - The Key to Profitability
A February Meeting Recap by Sarah Bailey

Managing for success is tying in the product, your target market and the total customer experience. The key to success is your organizations core values and being tuned to a single value discipline to achieve market leadership. Our February guest speaker, Caryl Helsel, Solutionz International, focused on the important of knowing your customer and taking customer service to the next level.

Choosing customer intimacy means embracing the "total customer experience", managing "moments of truth" and demanding a culture that puts the customer at the "center of your world".

"The new agenda in CRM is to make customers feel good whenever they make contact with your company. Every interaction isn't a moment to be avoided or cut short, but an opportunity for further intimacy with the customer." Steve Ballou, CRM Global Service Leader at the IBM Institute for Business Value

Our speaker put it brilliantly when she stated the following; the question is not "how many customers do you have" but it is "how well do you know the customers you do have - what is the depth of the relationship?"

Once you know your client intimately you can market & re ward them in a relevant manner which will lead to repeat business and excellent word-of-mouth marketing. As we all know this is usually the least expensive and easiest way to reach a new client.

Why is customer loyalty important? According to a recent TIA report, hotels get nearly half of their revenues from the small segment of travelers who spend about a month each year on the road: frequent visitors make up only 10 percent of all hotel guests but account for 44 percent of hotel nights. The key is to create an emotionally loyal customer because when the customer feels an attachment to the brand the loyalty is more likely to last.

Bring your entire team into the mix and develop a customer-centric culture by rewarding and modeling the right behaviors. Having your team right down to the front-line employees buy in to this mentality will wow your customers and ensure high levels of customer satisfaction.

The question is how well do you know your customer and how can you help them experience customer nirvana?

A BIG thank you to our hosts from Rawhide, to Bill Johnson for the LCD projector, to Richard Carmer and Picture Phoenix for the photo memories and to Penny Allphin and the Carefree Resort for accommodating our NAU students.

Our February Slideshow!

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