Hospitality's Innovative Technology: Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Customer Data Platform (CDP), what’s the difference?

You may have heard the terms "CDP" and "CRM" floating around the industry. Both are valuable tools that may help your property solve critical business needs. However, what are they? And what's the difference?

Let's break down these acronyms and dive into what each system can do for your property.

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What is a CDP?

CDP stands for customer data platform. A CDP solution consolidates data from various tech systems to create a single master customer profile. It constantly collects and deploys real-time customer information to all connected tech solutions. It gathers customer data from various sources and merges and removes duplicate profiles.

A CDP syncs across property departments or locations in the hospitality sector and is configurable to meet business needs. Most hotels have data in many places: reservations, spas, restaurants, activity management ,membership and loyalty programs, sales and marketing software, etc.  A CDP can centralize all this guest data so property staff can access the same information in every connected system.  

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What is a CRM?

CRM stands for customer (or client) relationship management and stores data relevant to a property's relationships with its guests. A CRM helps properties manage relationships by logging data, such as contact info, previous communications and interactions, and past bookings.

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How are CDPs used?

A CDP is designed to help every single department of your hotel do its job more efficiently while also powering personal guest experiences. With a CDP, a property can blend "high-tech" and "high-touch" hospitality. Every department has accesses to the full guest profile, and you can create truly personalized experiences at every single touch point—the spa desk can ask about a guest's dinner reservations or future activities and provide real recommendations. 

Some examples of the benefits of a CDP include:

• Synchronize operational needs so your front desk, housekeeping, and amenity providers can see guests' complete and accurate itineraries – everyone is equipped to assist guests.
• Automatically create and send trip itineraries to your guests from reservations across your entire property.
• Give guests the ability to manage reservations across departments or locations, creating, editing, or canceling reservations. Which automatically updates their itineraries.
• Create targeted marketing with suggestions based on data from every department, including spending habits, trends, preferences, and more. 
• Endless possibilities – Unify CDP is configurable to meet any data needs you have

How are CRMs Used?

CRMs are mostly used by customer-facing departments, including sales, marketing, and front desk. CRMs take in guest data to create profiles and track communications, including emails and phone calls. At a baselevel, CRMs are databases that allow users to log data to track their customers and manually analyze that data to assist in activities like marketing campaigns.

CRMs are also used to aid in sales. A property can track a guest's journey to staying with them to understand the entire sales cycle of a reservation. Additionally, properties can see how often guests have stayed with them, what activities they booked, and how much money they spent on the property.

Benefits of a CRM to a property include:

• Logging data like phone conversations, emails, and demographics
• Tracking the sales cycle to better understand the process a typical guest goes through
• Users analyze the logged data to create marketing emails based on guest's communication preferences

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What’s the difference?

CRMs and CDPs are becoming increasingly popular in the hospitality industry. While both CRMs and CDPs are used for collecting and managing customer data, they serve different purposes.

The data collected by CRMs is often manually stored for a highly specific purpose. Due to this, data in a CRM can be challenging to automate. Examples of typical data tracked in a CRM include notes from your latest conversation with a key account or the voicemail you left a repeat guest about a promotion. Since each staff member may have their own way of taking notes, standardizing this type of data can be difficult. CRM data is typically intended for use within the CRM itself, meaning the data you input is for viewing within the system, and pulling this data to use elsewhere can be difficult.

CDPs address the issue of a disparate tech stack and having data in siloed systems. CDPs support teams in gathering customer data from various sources, including property management systems, mobile apps, spa software, point-of-sale systems, and even CRMs. They then standardize and unify this data into a single golden record. All teams across a property, a management company, or multiple locations can view and use the same golden record.

CRMs are designed to organize and manage interactions between your team and customers. In contrast, CDPs collect and integrate data from your entire tech stack to gain a deeper understanding of customer behavior and traits.

The main objective of a CDP is to support high-level business decisions, create targeted marketing campaigns, boost customer engagement and satisfaction, while ensuring data quality at scale. CDPs achieve this by gathering data from every touchpoint—such as transactions, ad clicks, website visits, in-product behavior, offline interactions (like preferences or requests), and more. They then consolidate this data to form a single, unified view of each customer with identity-resolved profiles.

In summary, a CRM is a tool that allows you to manually store and track your customer data while a CDP gives you the power to unlock the value of your customer data by connecting your entire tech stack and unifying your property.

About Jonas Unify

Jonas Unify is a technology company seeking to innovate the hospitality industry’s technology landscape. We’re solving the hotel industry’s data problem, unifying guest data across marketing, operations, payment, and more. Jonas Unify will centralize your guest data and expand your operations through its Customer Data Platform (CDP) and connected apps.

Unify CDP is a revolutionary platform designed for hoteliers’ unique needs. It bridges the gap between best-in-breed technology to help you create an all-in-one platform, with connected and synched guest data. Jonas Unify is making true guest-centric hospitality possible with our suite of solutions.

Harness the power of your data and transform it into actionable insights, streamlined operations, and personalized guest experiences. Centralize and synchronize guest data from multiple solutions in real time. Ready to take the next step? Discover Jonas Unify CDP today and unlock your data’s potential. Setup a demo today – the journey to data-driven operations starts here.

Learn more at jonasunify.com and follow us on LinkedIn to stay updated.

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