Sequential Soft’s own flagship product (Silver CRM) is the ideal application suite for the sales and marketing, revenue management, guest, user support and the service departments with the hotel industry. Silver CRM’s key modules such as Loyalty, Partnership Incentive Program and Corporate Incentive Program provide very essential functionality such as Tier Management, Central Administration, Production and Statement Management as well as Accruals and Redemptions.Each sub component has been supported by graphical interactive and reporting tool for the decision makers. Each of these processes supports the sales force in their customer negotiations, and increases the productivity. The system offers the complete function set required for operating all the areas of the sales & marketing activities.

“SilverCRM” suite provides the functionality to operate various loyalty programs using one single backend. To implement such program track of customers, their transactions within the promotional schemes, accrual of points/miles, redemption of points/miles, awards and rewards, reporting, etc

The overall purpose of the Loyalty Programme is to retain its best customers and motivate repeat spending on the products and facilities sold by them.

1. Identifying who customers are and segmenting them based on spend patterns.
2. Rewarding customers for spending.
3. Communicating with customers on a regular basis, tailoring messages based on spending history.
4. Enhancing the level of service and understanding afforded to best customers.

The different Modules of the Incentive/Loyalty Programs are:

- Corporate Booker Incentive Program
- Guest Incentive Program
- Hotel Partnership Program

Corporate Booker Incentive Program
Knowledge about markets and competitors, as well as about technological discoveries and developments are the foundations for innovation, the source of new products, new revenues and wealth. Knowledge workers are key assets in the information economy. The knowledge as well as capabilities of value chain partners largely determine how well any firm succeeds.

The gathering, analysis, storage, arranging access to and use of data about the customers is the key driver of CRM processes and impact on the firm. Indeed, the major up-front expenditures in enterprise-wide adoption of CRM tend to be for the information technology needed to integrate current customer knowledge, enable the creation of an adequate customer database, and make both work to enable the success of CRM initiatives.

The sharing of the organisation’s information about its operations, problems, aspirations, opportunities, vision and strategy – is also an essential component of CRM. Managing relationships with partners that precede the organisation in its value delivery chain (suppliers), that are cooperating with it in “open management” approaches to delivering value (allies), and that serve as intermediaries in relationships with customers (brokers, agents, distributors, etc.) is as vital as managing relations with customers. And the sharing of knowledge about customers with such partners provides both the intelligence and source of trust needed to make such relationships work.

The “SilverCRM” “Corporate Booker Incentive Program” is the loyalty program for incenting and recognizing those individuals who provide hotel with the business, like room booking for their executives and corporate events. The program enables to recognize and appreciate efforts by individuals working behind the scenes doing their part in marketing the hotel products.

Typically the corporate loyalty members would be secretaries and PAs who arrange the bookings with the hotel properties for their company’s corporate stays and F&B events. These events are registered electronically and tagged along with the membership number in the hotel’s PMS and catering systems

The Corporate Booker Incentive Program covers all the feature of Membership management that would be used in enrolling a Corporate member, maintaining a member database, viewing transaction history and tracking communication history. This functionality is covered under two major sub modules: Member Enrollment (used for data-entering new corporate applications and adding new bookers to existing corporate members) and Member Help Desk (used for updates, transaction viewing and tracking all correspondence.)

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Guest Incentive Program
The data-analysis about customers is being used in CRM to select targets for marketing communication, customize content of messages and select the best media and channels for sending them. One of CRM’s key contributions to its adopters is improving both the effectiveness and efficiency of marketing communications and sales interactions, thanks to knowing the right things about customers.

Knowledge about customers can be a major differentiator in sales and account management. Demonstrating knowledge about customers and prospects strengthens the sales force’s credibility and demonstrates their commitment to helping them. Consultative selling, i.e. focusing on what the customers’ problems and aspirations are, and then describing how they can be addressed through the firm’s offerings, can only be employed if the sales force knows what those problems and aspirations are and how the firm’s offerings can fit with business clients’ operations and consumers’ lives.

Knowledge management is the foundation of CRM, though it is usually referred to as “CRM Analytics” when this is the case. But knowledge marketing, i.e. using knowledge to deliver added value to customers, is rarely mentioned in the CRM context. And since adding value to customers is one of the strongest foundations for customer loyalty, the marketing of knowledge can be as useful and important as its management applications in achieving CRM success.

Through the introduction of a point/miles-based system (Hotel Dollars as the currency), the Loyalty Card program become a true recognition programme to identify and rewards the frequent and loyal customers who use to the hotel products and facilities.

The earning points can be based on total transaction amount but item level information is captured, i.e. department spend, to allow the targeted promotion. With this customers needs and spend trends is collected for business decisions for the future.

The points are credited once the settlement is made for the spend. Where settlement is made on site, the points will be awarded instantly after the following night audit. All the spend that is directed to city ledger, the points for such spend will be awarded once the credit manager has authorized the spend for earning points.

The points are credited on the agreed account, i.e. individual, booker or the authorized program administrator.

Incentive to use the program will be provided by instant rewards on achievement of reasonable target spend. These rewards will be in the form of vouchers that can be used across the hotel chain.

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Hotel Partnership Program Management
The “SilverCRM” “Hotel Partnership Manager” is another add-on incentive/loyalty program where the guests who use the hotel products are rewarded indirectly by the hotel partners, i.e. airlines, banks, retailer etc. The application is a tool for the program manager to run the partnership programs with minimum support from IT. The application provides the flexibility to define the promotions by stays or by the spend level based on the defined criteria. The application also provides the flexibility on fix or variable miles rewards. The application provides the functionality to export the data to the partner site as per the required format using any media.

At the moment there are no “plug-n-play” products available in the market that can be used by the Hotels to run the partner programs. The “SilverCRM - Hotel Partnership Manager” is fully synchronized with Fidelio PMS and requires less than one week set-up time before the partnership programs can be defined and operated with full functionality.

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