It was just one night in a hotel

I've been working from the Smokey Mountains this week.  It's beautiful.  I'd stay here forever if I could.  But the hotels I've stayed at don't know that.  And they really don't seem to know much else, either.

According to a CW article today, Choice Hotels are implementing a new customer data integration (CDI) that's supposed to help those hotels recognize customers.  I'd like to see it.  My choice of hotels is usually one in the Choice chain.  They're affordable, clean, and for the most part comfortable.  But in all the times that I've stayed in a Choice hotel, I've never been 'recognized' by their computer system.  In fact, I have a customer rewards number with them, but more often than not I forget to use the number when I book the hotel, so I don't get credit for the stays.

The new CDI software, however, is supposed to integrate with a CRM software and should remove at least a portion of the duplicate customer entries and enable better marketing to guests at the point of check-in.  As I understand the article, that means that when a guest checks into the hotel, then the clerk helping them can be prompted to first check to ensure the address they have on file is the correct address and next to 'upsell' to the guest, at that time.

That's a useful feature for some guests (like me) who are moving from hotel to hotel during a trip.  I am one of those people who tends to book my hotel the day before I stay, because I don't always know where I'm going to be until the day before.  On this trip, for example, I've been in Nashville, Sweetwater, Gatlinburg, and tomorrow I may be back in Sweetwater (or maybe Fall Creek Falls, I'm not sure yet).  If, when I'm checking into a hotel, the person checking me in were to say "Would you like to use your rewards card with this?  And if you book your next stay with us now we'll double those rewords," I might very well find it worthwhile to plan a little farther in advance. 

To me, these are the best possible situations that well-designed customer-centric software can provide to organizations.  They benefit both the customer and the company.  And they're the kind of situations that are only possible with software that serves a problem-specific business goal.  The problem for Choice hotels is that often guest information is duplicated, which prevents them from seeing a clear picture of their guests.  The software is well designed to help solve that problem, and as a result, the benefit is increased (and much better targeted) marketing abilities.  THAT's the promise of customer data integration, or customer service, or business intelligence--whatever name you choose to call it.