Application and Implementation of CRM in hotels of developing cities - A case study of Ranchi Srivastava Praveen1, Shandilya Abhinav Kumar1, Srivastava Shelly2 1Assistant Professor, HMCT, BIT Mesra, Ranchi 2Assistant Professor, Management, BIT Mesra, Ranchi Online published on 26 June, 2013. Abstract Hotel sells room to the guest. It is the main product that Hotel sells and with the sale of this product, other hotel products like food, beverage, laundry services etc. also get sold. Earlier when the numbers of hotels were limited, guests were not left with many choices. They were bound to select from the available few. This placed hotelier at the comfort zone as they never thought about building any long term relations with the guest. Their marketing strategy was limited only till the guest made transaction with the hotel. This was known as transactional approach of marketing and hoteliers were involved in this marketing to sell their prime product (i.e. rooms) and earn revenue. However, with the change in time situation changed. The number of hotels increased and made it difficult for the hotelier to sell the product without relationship marketing. The concept of transactional marketing was pushed back and in order to sell the product every hotelier started considering customer as an insider to the hotel and aimed to build a long lasting relationship with him or her. This approach of relationship marketing with the time changed into Customer Relationship Management (CRM) which according to Christopher et al (1990) is “a tool to turn current and new customer into regularly purchasing client and then progressively move them through being strong supporters of the company and its product to finally being active and vocal advocates for the company”. Hence, without an appropriate CRM it is now difficult not only to retain the customer but also to attract new customer to the hotels. This paper presents a study conducted on the hotels of Ranchi to analyze whether the hotels in developing city accept and implement the concept of customer relationship management. The study focuses on the attributes of CRM and level up to which it is accepted by both Hotelier and Guests in this city. This study is also aimed to find out the acceptance and use of e-CRM concept in the hotels and effect it has on the satisfaction level of customer visiting the Hotels. Top Keywords Customer Relationship Management, Hotel, Transactional approach, loyal customer, e-CRM. Top |