With Salesforce CRM, Millennium & Copthorne Hotels PLC Gives Reps Critical Data About International Properties and Customers

Need to Maximize Sales Focus and Customer Relationships

Millennium & Copthorne Hotels plc is a dynamic, global hotel company, which owns, asset manages and/or operates over 110 hotels in 18 countries around the world. It operates four-star deluxe and five-star properties throughout the United Kingdom, Continental Europe, North America, Asia, New Zealand, North Africa, and the Middle East.

The global hotel and travel industry has faced a difficult market that has been slow to recover. The tragedy of 9/11 was followed by the war in Iraq and the SARS outbreak, all of which affected the confidence of the travelling public. Following the peak of 2000, the key business sector had also embarked on a programme of reduced costs and travel.

In order to combat this challenging market, Millennium & Copthorne needed to build the effectiveness of its corporate sales force and maximize customer relationships. It needed to manage and share corporate customer information across territories. The problem was that it did not have a system in place to achieve this.

Salespeople had been using a combination of individual Excel spreadsheets and paper. Sharing information was difficult, time consuming, and far from accurate. "We recognized that an urgent requirement was to install an integrated CRM solution to maximize our sales focus and manage corporate customer relationships across continents," comments Fiona Cole, sales development manager at Millennium & Copthorne.

Customization Is Key

"In our search for a solution we began with a blank sheet of paper," says Cole. "We considered everything from the traditional client/server approach from leading CRM vendors such as Siebel to developing our own system in house." Both approaches were rejected because of the major capital expenditure involved in hardware and software combined with lengthy implementation times. "We could not afford to wait around 12 to 18 months to get closer to our customers and focus our sales efforts," says Cole.

Criteria for selection of a CRM solution included speed of implementation, minimal or no capital expenditure, and the facility to customize the system not only to the hotel industry but also to Millennium & Copthorne's specific company needs.

The company chose a CRM solution from salesforce.com. Salesforce.com provides the power of enterprise-class CRM software for a monthly subscription per user. By offering the Salesforce CRM application as a Web service, salesforce.com eliminates the need to buy, install, or maintain hardware, software, or networks.

Millennium & Copthorne selected Salesforce CRM Professional Edition for an initial 135 users. The system was implemented globally in less than 90 days.

Managing a Product that Changes Daily

The facility to customize Salesforce CRM is key for Millennium & Copthorne. "Salesforce CRM is very easy to use, and we don't need IT consultants to customize it to our specific requirements," says Cole.

An immediate benefit was the facility to communicate special offers on particular hotels to the global sales team on the home page. "The hotel industry is relatively unusual in that we don't have a fixed-price product," explains Cole. "The product changes daily depending on supply and demand. With Salesforce CRM we can decide on special offers and communicate them immediately to our global sales force, which helps to maximise occupancy rates." The group can also run marketing campaigns aimed at particular audiences.

Millennium & Copthorne has also customized the system so it can analyze which activities generate the most bookings. "This is particularly useful in the hotel industry and helps us direct our marketing spending," comments Cole. For example, the marketing department can capture data on leads generated as a result of a particular exhibition, which helps to identify the best ones in which to participate in the future.

Millennium & Copthorne makes particular use of Salesforce CRM's dashboard facility. Dashboards provide a graphic scorecard of key performance indicators covering sales, marketing, and support. This provides a picture of the health and prospects of the business in a one-page snapshot featuring benchmarks and critical corporate metrics and data. Each hotel has its own dashboard, which acts as the agenda for meetings and conference calls. Like the rest of Salesforce CRM, dashboards can be customized.

Lane says that the introduction of Salesforce CRM has dramatically reduced the amount of wasted effort chasing up information and time spent by salespeople on reporting. "We don't need to ask a salesperson about a particular account," she says. "All the data and customer contacts are there centrally. Reporting is highly automated so our salespeople spend less time on administration and more time selling." While it is hard to calculate, Cole estimates that this facility alone has increased customer facing and sales time by at least 10 percent.

Salesforce CRM has also given senior management a much clearer view of its business internationally. "It's much easier to see the effectiveness of our salespeople. We have a much better view of our customers globally and a more accurate feel for trends in the marketplace," says Cole. "We live in a globalized economy. It is critical to share real-time information on multinational accounts and opportunities."

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