The role of the Revenue Management specialist in a SaaS company for hotels
Beonprice’s Revenue Specialists play a key role in accompanying clients, putting themselves in the hotelier’s shoes and helping them to implement technology and design strategies to improve profitability.
By Andrea Senarega, Revenue Management Specialist at Beonprice
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In previous articles we have talked about important technical aspects and methodologies that we carry out at Beonprice. Today I want to talk to you about the human factor: within our Customer Success Department we have several profiles to guarantee the satisfaction of our customers, ensuring that they get the maximum value from our solution and above all that they achieve their goals. I am referring to our Revenue Specialists and the role they play from the moment a customer decides to implement Beonprice: how we carry out the process of welcoming and accompanying our customers and how we help them to maximise their property’s revenue.
Hotel digital transformation: software and knowledge
It is becoming increasingly common to hear that the hotel sector is undergoing a phase of digital transformation, not only because it is adapting to the technological era we are currently living in, but also because many believe that technology will facilitate the recovery from the crisis experienced as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.
In recent years, more and more hoteliers have opted for a Revenue Management System (RMS) such as Beonprice as part of their digital transformation plan. An RMS is a sophisticated system that covers many aspects. Thanks to artificial intelligence algorithms, the RMS provides intelligent, data-driven decisions, thus helping to empower revenue managers.
This all sounds great, but it is important to note that when a hotel or hotel group decides to have an RMS, it is not just waiting for the technology to be installed and go live. As Nick Mehta rightly expressed in the book Customer Success: How Innovative Companies Are Reducing Churn and Growing, there is a concern that technology providers generate in their customers, and that is that they install the software and each party goes on their way, instead of challenging the customer, helping them to identify what they are currently doing that they could do better through the contracted technology. The simplest explanation for this is that, in most cases, the customer not only buys the software, but also wants the expertise of the people behind it.
At Beonprice, as I mentioned before, the expertise is largely provided by the Customer Engagement team, as part of the Customer Success department. Each and every one of us has experience as Revenue Managers in previous roles, and in this way we ensure that we speak the same language as our customers and ensure that we can help them transform their business. We also understand the issues they face and can provide them with solutions that we have already implemented in other organisations.
The Customer Success department
There are many definitions of Customer Success, but one that I particularly like is Brandon Hickie’s definition in The Beginner’s Ultimate Guide to Customer Success,, which defines it as the process that integrates customer goals, context and outcomes into the company’s culture, vision, strategy and operations. This guide discusses how the people in charge of Customer Success in an organisation should help transform the relationship with customers to become as collaborative as possible for both parties, making it easier to become a technology partner, while achieving the customer’s goals.
Surely you can already see how important it is for Beonprice that Customer Success managers have experience in Revenue Management, to help our clients transform their company, right?
Today we want to show you the different stages through which we take our customers through the Customer Engagement Journey Map, generally known as User Onboarding. In this journey, the customer is always accompanied by one or more members of our team. It is very important that each Customer Success team has its own defined process, as it must match, or better still, exceed the customer’s expectations in order to ensure a long-term relationship.
Customer Engagement Journey Map
As it is impossible to tell you about all the activities we carry out at each stage, I will briefly talk about the most important ones:
· Within the Implementation stage, the Kick-off meeting is the starting point: we sit down with our clients to analyse their current situation and review what goals they want to achieve together with Beonprice. On the list of objectives we can find everything from helping to design a Revenue Management strategy through our technology, to the need for automation of pricing processes.
· During the RM Culture stage, we give our clients access to Revenue Management Online Certificates with all the content designed by us. These Certificates are intended to involve the entire company in the Revenue Management culture. In the meantime, our Revenue Specialists work on drawing up a plan that includes not only the objectives mentioned above, but also an analysis of opportunities that we will incorporate into the whole plan.
· In the Training and Configuration phase, we accompany our customers during all the tool configuration activities. In this phase we are already introducing many of the basics of the system that will facilitate the next phase.
· Nearing the end of our process, we have the Adaptation stage. Among the different activities that make up this stage is adapting the use of our solution to the needs of each client. As I said before, an RMS is a sophisticated system and each client may have different needs. As these have already been detected and analysed in previous stages, it is now a matter of guiding them in the use of our technology to meet those needs.
· In the Service stage, we analyse together the fulfilment of the objectives we set at the beginning of the process. To do this, we hold regular meetings, which we call Health Check, in which we study the appropriate use of the tool by users, and the Business Review meeting, in which both parties discuss the performance that is being achieved with the implementation of Beonprice at an organisational level.
Although it may seem that the process has an end, the truth is that it does not. Once we reach the Service stage, the support is constant and the contact with our customers does not cease.
In short, the human side of technology is crucial to the success of the implementation. In the process of change, accompanying the client with specialists capable of putting themselves in the hotelier’s shoes generates confidence and security to take steps towards continuous improvement. What is clear is that, regardless of the department in which we find ourselves, at Beonprice what really moves us is to make our customers happy.
