We're discussing how to build sustained scale customer relationships and we're speaking with Sergio Techcera. He is the Director of Global Operations with the Shiji. The Shiji provides software solutions to enhance guest experience and help the hospitality industry with their servicing needs. In terms of technology around the guest, how large is the company? Altogether, there's about 1200 employees at this moment just outside of China. We have a huge base in China as
well. We have offices all over the world from Australia to Malaysia to Singapore to three here in the US and opening a few more over the next few months. There's a reason behind that. We are global that we try and be a local company no matter how big we get and you cover a range of different types of industries and companies within that. Correct everything from your restaurant, from your restaurant within the hotel, to your golf and spa to your golf courses.
We literally cover a lot anything that is hospitality related and has a guest involved. You're working with high end customers, which means they have very high end expectations of you. When you work with demanding guests, you and yourself become demanding of your providers and your partners. So it's a chain reaction. We are also demanding as well, but that kind of it kind of fits into the chain that way.
And so therefore the customer relationship, customer loyalty aspect must be extremely important to your business. If you understand your customer's business always needs, that's half the battle one. It's so easy to say that, but the execution, especially in the industry in which you work, hospitality must be so complex. If you talk hospitality, my computer down is down, means I have a queue sitting in front of me.
I have 17 people facing me. I have a list of screaming customers in front of me going, where's my room? I can't get into my room. So technology needs to be a little more seamless. It needs to work and it needs to be reliable. When you think about the customer life cycle, establishing that relationship, sustaining that relationship, ensuring loyalty so that the customer comes back, broadly speaking, what are your strategies for approaching that life cycle?
We are moving into a different age of technology, the customer before when it came to hotel solutions, it was very sticky. Once you've installed something, very hard to get out of it, You know, training staff, there's a big disruption that happens when you change technology in a hotel. It's stressful, there's a lot of change, management involved, process changes and it's pretty big. As technology has evolved, this has become a lot easier to
change. People are adapting a lot more to change, so we've had to change our mindset as well. It sounds like there's a very significant digital transformation aspect to this. There is the hospitality industry went through a huge transformation. I think it was probably the industry that got impacted the most With Pandemic, you think about it, everything had to change and it hated to change pretty quickly. So everybody was looking for new technologies.
We need to be able to do more remote checkins. We need to have that distance. But how do you achieve that without losing the contact to the guest? It's a key element to this. So technology evolved incredibly in the last 2-3 years. The demands of what people need and the competition that's existing at the moment has forced the hoteliers to rely more on their technology. It's not just about having a solution to checking the guest. But it's a solution to understand the guest.
So again, it's another dimension of working closely with customers, collaborating with customers to really understand what they need and then of course their ultimate customer who is the. Guest Exactly. And that is the best way to achieve something is if you understand the whole journey and understand the end goal of what your customer needs, the better you are able to deliver.
What a customer needs. So therefore you have to put yourself in the mind of both your customer, the hospitality chain, hotel, whatever it might be, venue as well as their customer. Correct. As part of a hospitality service provider, the first thing I do in the hotel. I'm looking at the room at everything else. I'm looking how is this operating? Oh, that's interesting how you're doing that. Oh, your card works nicely and
it's very strange. And I'm not looking at from a technology point of view, but I'm looking at it from an experience point of view and learning and it comes in as a second nature. I think all everybody that's come from hospitality, that's probably the first thing that they do. So I consider that putting myself as a guest. And understanding, OK, what is
happening now is a trend. And keeping up to date on that, we need to offer protection, we need to offer Peace of Mind and we need to offer seamlessness to that experience. Now let's go back to this notion of customer relationships and retention and scaling all of this. Tell us about the technologies that you use to make all that happen. Although we are a hospitality service provider, solutions provider, we are still a company. We still have our needs, our
measurements. We need to understand how our growth works. We need to understand our customers habits. We need to understand their service needs as well. We need to identify trends. We need to anticipate that there is an issue if we are going to be a local. Company providing local support to our customers and providing services to our customers.
We need to have the abilities to 1st identify them of course, but also understand what are our customers, Who are our customers, what do they have from us and what do they need. The more information we have about our customers, the better we can service. Their needs. And that goes from everything from the sales, the marketing process right through to at the end of the day to your finance needs. Where does Zoho fit into this landscape you've just been describing?
At the end of the day, we still need to operate as a business and our demand that is driven from the customers in terms of partnership and working together with our customers, we expect the same thing and this is where Zoho fits in. It's a good partnership that we have.
Have the support and it helps us drive our business really in terms of from our CRM, our sales teams, our marketing teams, campaign management helps us convert with the customer conversion and customer retention in a lot of things end data. When we did partner up with Zoho, it was a very natural evolution there coming. What are the Zoho products that you're using? We started with people, but it quickly evolved. We moved quickly into CRM and desk. We then put campaigns in marketing forms.
We need to understand our data a little bit more. So we brought in analytics in the process of gathering our CRM data and now let's compare it with our service data. But they listen. And it's incredible how their development and evolution is actually pretty impressive. I've actually been following Zoho for years and they really do listen and they really want customer feedback. They really do care. Let's jump back to these
customer relationships. What are the principles that, for you, underlie the establishment of these strong, ongoing relationships? The partnership and relationship and the way that you communicate, work together and listen to your customers is key. If you do all those together, the retention almost. Happens naturally. Now you've mentioned data several times and you mentioned that you're a data-driven organization. Can you tell us about the role of data in all of this as well?
So one of the projects that we currently working on is how do we use that data, what else can we bring in to it to help our organization work better. And it's just small things, but it's great that you have this great sales analysis. But there are other factors that you need to consider. Great sales have sold 50 million in there, but then you go and look at the other side and you go oh, why have we only installed one customer out of those 50 million.
And then this is where the analysis comes in and if we can improve that whole journey and if we understand the customer journey from end to end and not just look at it at sales numbers and you know support numbers. But look at it as a whole. That improves our efficiency as an organization, but also a response how we work. So you're looking at the data to help guide you through the entire customer journey?
Correct. So the more we have in there, the better it helps us to understand what that journey is. It's interesting that in our organization, our journey is sometimes pretty different, if you think about it. You are my customer as a golf resort is very different to my spa customer. The needs are different. They all want to achieve the same thing in the service of the
guest. The needs, the requirements, the sales cycle is completely different and the end results and the requirements are also a little bit different. So let's talk about personalization then, because that's really what you're alluding to, using the data to understand the customer regardless of their specific environment. At the end of the day, if you look at a lot of noise, it never makes any sense. So you always try to elude to patterns. You're trying to elude to trends.
Only once you identify a trend can you look into it deeper. But if you focus on a lot of noise, it doesn't really help you in making decisions at all the time of going into spreadsheets and. Pulling all this data and spending 60,000 hours of mine work to try and find come to a solution that now takes you 5 minutes nowadays. It's incredible change. I do remember times when a revenue manager used to spend, you know, hours and hours looking OK, we've made this much, this is what I'm
forecasting and everything else. You now have revenue management software where it just goes in there and says, well, you should sell your rooms at this amount. And this is how you make the best profit. So this has been a big shift in this with data. I think this is the next level with analytics tools as well within the hospitality industry. What are the Zoho tools that you're using to help you with?
This mainly analytics on this, they've come up with something fantastic actually, which is the data transformation. It's kind of a little bit of a godsend, spanning mistakes, inconsistency of data. It's tricky. It's it's tough to, you know, when you have a huge amount of data to manage all that and not have like 5 dedicated people doing that. And the fact that you can actually bring it from other sources. You don't just have to rely on the Zoho products.
You can actually bring it in from anywhere and then you can have your full analysis on it. So you know, for us as a business, we see the importance of it and you know, see a CEO actually constantly, he's got his dashboard now. And he can actually, in five seconds he's got a full overview of what's happening in the company in terms of sales and everything else. So pretty felt powerful to.
So would it be correct then to say that data for you is the foundation of not only understanding your business, but understanding the customer, their habits, their expectations, the patterns and the trends that are arising to help you run your business better and to be more responsive to your customers? If you can anticipate A customer's need sort of like let me forecast my revenue, let me forecast what my customer experience is, that would be a
great tool. It's having the ability to find those and see those, identify those. This is where data becomes key. There's no other way that you can have a coordinated action unless you have something that you can actually make a plan from, and that is what data brings you it gives you. It gives you a start to where you can plan to and then the ability to learn and to take those lessons in order to scale and also Dr. consistency.
To me, scaling is helping the organizers organization grow in a sensible way. To grow in a sensible way, again you need to understand your patterns and your data patterns to be able to make the right decisions of where you are going to go. And this applies across the region. You know, the products, the region, the sales teams and everything. How does the data help you drive customer loyalty and customer retention? Can you draw that linkage for us? Customer happiness.
Customer sentiment. You can also learn from your lessons as well. This is the other thing, just because I've lost 10 customers because I haven't talked to them for 20 months, If I don't know that, then I won't be able to do anything about it. So I'm going to lose another 20 customers at the end of the month. But learning from your lessons from that data, that is the other. The other part of it, so the data then, is telling you the story of the customer at various
points in their lifecycle. Correct. And again it comes back data from identify the customer journey. How did I find you? How did I convince you? How did I keep you and how do I keep you further? And if you've gone, how do I get you back, What strikes me as being very valuable, very important is you have clear business metrics and clear business goals, and that's your focus. But then you're using the data to support the achievement of those very specific business goals.
It's not just all about growth. There's no point in growing if you're bleeding everything from the other side. So it's the harmonious relationship that you have during the customer journey that you know it's a lot of effort to gain a customer. It's a lot easier to retain a customer if you do everything right.
And if you look at cost analysis when it comes to it, how much it actually takes to gain a new customer, it's actually, you know what if you retain your customers a lot more, it's a lot more efficient. We you know you. It's a very easy analysis to do, again through data and of course costs and marketing. You know, the effort of the salesperson, the Commission, everything that goes in there. Finally, you're a customer, you're on board, and then you're
working happily. If you don't upset them and you keep them happy, then you have a customer for life. Sergio, given all of this, what advice can you offer to folks who want to use technology and use data to drive better, stronger, deeper, longer lasting customer relationships? I always tend to look and say what are we trying to achieve as a business and what can help me achieve that in the best
possible way. Find something that's easy to administer that hasn't got a lot of complexity on it, but make sure that everything you. Do gives you the right output because this is what you are looking for. The data clean data to help you with the end result of what your software implementation was. As we finish up, I have to ask you this question. You have obvious empathy and understanding of the customer. How do you translate that into
technology and data? It doesn't matter how much data that you have, there is always a human element to this whole journey that you have on that. So translation of technology needs to be put yourself in people's shoes and it comes back to asking that question, what do I want to achieve on that? Don't overcomplicate it. Make it simple to use. Because sometimes making it simple to use, you capture the right information because people feel more natural about it.
How can I make your life a little bit better but at the same time, you know, help the company drive forward, actually caring? Exactly. Sergio Techcera, thank you so much for speaking with us. It was fantastic being here. Thank you.