Sol Meliá hotels receive a huge number of customers every year; customer focus and customer knowledge are fundamental factors in achieving commercial success. The Customer Relationship Management Department has the dual function of managing customer loyalty and increasing their value to the group, focusing service on customer needs and encouraging their transition between the different business units (Hotels / SMVC / Real Estate).

Customer Relationship Management is one of the five key areas in the company’s Strategic Plan and includes the important “Unique customer vision” and “Customer knowledge” projects.

Unique customer vision

This project is based around the creation of a centralised Sol Meliá master customer database storing standardised data collected from every customer contact point and allowing that information to be used legally and securely.

The definition of the customer Contact File has been coordinated with all of the company departments and business areas, along with the review of processes and improvements in systems which enable us to collect extensive, high quality customer information.

The Unique Vision project is vitally important to the application of Data Protection Laws which regulate the use of customer information. Corporate Head Office has made a series of adjustments to the systems and processes that have helped us adapt to the requirements of the new law to be introduced in April 2009.

Customer knowledge

One of the most important advances in the strategic area of CRM is, without any doubt, customer knowledge.

En este apartado destaca la implantación del software SAS, que nos ha permitido extraer e integrar la información relevante del cliente, dispersa en las diferentes bases de datos, y transformarla en conocimiento mediante el uso de algoritmos de Data Mining. Entre sus aplicaciones está la identificación de patrones de reservas, preferencias de hoteles, destinos o marcas, así como los canales preferidos de contacto (e-mail, móvil, etc.).

With the objective of offering the customer better service and better adapting to their needs in an increasingly competitive market, it is imperative that we maximize our knowledge of our customers.

The implementation of SAS software has allowed us to extract and integrate relevant customer information collected from different databases and transform it into knowledge using Data Mining algorithms. Amongst the applications it includes is the identification of booking patterns, hotel, destination or brand preferences, as well as preferred contact channels (e-mail, mobile phone, etc.).

The advanced analysis achieved through SAS has generated a file on the habits of some 5 million customers over the last four years (2005-2008). The analysis will be greater still in the coming months, once the Unique Vision project is available and customer profiling implementation is completed. We are currently in a stage in which we are developing a methodology based on the customer lifecycle, with the objective of adjusting our current campaign strategies to the behaviour of each particular customer, taking into account their preferences, tastes and values. This will result in campaigns that are more and more specialised, campaigns focused on specific customer segments, offering exactly what each group wants and making them more likely to book.

At the end of 2008, the percentage of customers by nationality was the following: