Mobile CRM for travel companies

This year we've seen increasing coverage of 'mobile' in the travel press and at industry conferences, and it seems that many travel companies have dipped their toe in the water with mobile projects (or are planning to do something shortly).

This is great. But, my concern is that once travel companies have done their first mobile project, perhaps by implementing a non-personalised, first generation mobile web-site (e.g. an airline providing timetables, flight status, etc or a hotel allowing people to browse its properties and perhaps book a room), they think they've ticked the mobile box and that they can move on and forget about it.

But, mobile is so much more than this. Mobile offers the most personal way of communicating with your customers through a device they carry with them all of the time. It is the ultimate 1:1 marketing tool. As such, it should be embedded into every travel companies contact strategy.

Saying you've done mobile, is like sending confirmation emails to your customers and deciding that you've done email. If you took this attitude, you wouldn't send email newsletters to your existing customers, you wouldn't use email to promote special offers, you wouldn't email customers to notify them of changes to their booking.

And, it's the same with mobile.

I think as the market matures, travel companies will develop a clearer view of all the places where mobile technology can help their business. For me, the sweet spot for mobile is building personalised dialogues with customers in the immediate lead up to and during their trip - this is "Mobile CRM".

For customers, the trip was their reason for booking, yet in many cases during the trip itself they have no contact with their travel company. Mobile CRM can bridge this gap and used well it creates new touch points that customers really value. These new touch points enhance the customers' experience, enhance their perception of your brand, and create new ancillary sales opportunities by reaching the customer at their point of need.

But, doing this isn't easy - you need to find and aggregate content relevant to your customer's trip, you need to filter and personalise this content, so they just see information relevant to the current phase of their trip; you need the ability to target offers for ancillaries at the right time, so the offer is useful rather than an annoying ad; and you need all this to work on any phone in the customer's preferred language.

Doing this isn't easy, but with the right help, it can be done and those travel companies who are first to embrace Mobile CRM will gain an edge over their competitors.