GMS Group: Revolutionizing F&B Loyalty Programs

Customer loyalty has always been a crucial area of focus for many businesses in the hospitality industry. After all, loyal customers are committed to future transactions with a particular hospitality brand, thus ensuring steady and long-term revenue. And businesses that realize the value of repeat transactions also recognize the need to incentivizing repeat customers.

Loyalty programs, on that front, act as a significant motivator for customers to stay loyal to a particular brand. Standard loyalty programs involve points, discounts, gifts, or promotional cards, which recompense customers for collecting a certain amount of points or spending specific monetary amounts at participating hotels. However, there are undeniable hurdles to setting up a successful loyalty program. The prime challenge for hotels is achieving enrolment targets for paid memberships. In today’s digital-first world, hospitality businesses need to leverage every available digital touchpoint to enroll and engage their customers. And despite understanding this necessity, many businesses struggle to digitalize their customer loyalty programs.

This is where GMS Group, a premium loyalty program provider in the APAC region, is creating a world of difference for the travel and hospitality businesses by enabling them to create a digitalized, end-to-end customer loyalty program.

GMS draws on its 20 years of experience to design, implement, and manage turnkey customer loyalty programs that are tailored to the needs of each hospitality brand.

The company uses a multi-pronged approach to enroll customers, including online lead generation, corporate sales and partnerships, and telemarketing to highly targeted customers. “We also use innovative multi-language instant messaging tools like WeChat and Line for post-sales marketing,” says Simon Lowater, co-chairman of GMS. In addition to these communication channels, GMS has developed a digital engagement platform (DEP) that enables hotels to provide its customers with a fully integrated mobile-optimized website and app for driving post-sales engagement. The DEP platform leverages the latest technology for online reservations, location-based promotions, and eVouchers. Making use of these tools, hospitality businesses can take a 360-degree approach in engaging customers throughout their membership year. To further ensure the success of these digital solutions and take clients’ loyalty programs to a new height, the onsite marketing managers of GMS work closely with partner hotels to create unique events and promotions to drive substantial incremental revenues for its clients.

What’s more? GMS’s loyalty programs utilize Salesforce CRM and Marketing Cloud to manage a client’s member database while driving meaningful engagement. Clients can listen to their customers and engage with them across various channels, such as email, social, web, and mobile. They can also automate and easily manage their marketing campaigns, analyse the results, and optimize the campaigns, all on the go. And since Salesforce CRM and Marketing Cloud are PCI compliant with multi-layer security and tiered access protocols, a client’s member data remain completely secure. Moreover, GMS’s clients can also seamlessly combine Oracle Micros and Infrasys POS (the renowned cloud-based restaurant management platform) with the existing stack of solutions to capture customer data. These leading-edge tools and software help clients to track spending patterns (recency, frequency, and monetary) of customers to develop the basis for a more refined and data-driven F&B marketing and member engagement plan with GMS.

Moving ahead with these robust capabilities, GMS is now the leading technology partner in the hotel F&B loyalty program space. On that front, GMS’s vision for the next 12-24 months is to double the size of its APAC clients by leveraging the best in class technology and service to help hotels attract high-spending loyal customers. “Through these efforts, we are now laser-focused on helping our clients build and foster a strong customer relationship, and increase their business bottomline in the hospitality sector,” concludes Lowater.