Customer Relationship Management: What You Need to Know

Q&A with Dave Langran, Technical Director, Gateway UK

For more than 15 years, Dave Langran has been helping attraction venues nurture deeper relationships with their members through powerful technologies. Recently, Dave developed a seamless integration between Galaxy® point-of-sale software and Microsoft Dynamics to create CRM Plus | Powered by Galaxy, an invaluable customer relationship tool for museums, zoos and aquariums, and other attractions to gain a stronger understanding of their visitors and take informed actions to nurture them.

At its core, what is Customer Relationship Management or CRM?

Dave: It’s knowing who your customers are. It can start out as gathering simple demographics such as age, gender, income and marital status. But the magic really happens when you gather more in-depth information such as transactional history, interests and engagement patterns.

How does having this detail benefit an attraction?

Dave: Armed with this information, they can develop marketing programs that provide mutual benefit for their customers and ultimately, their venue. Let’s imagine that you can run a report and see all your past visitors who have young children but haven’t visited your museum in the past 12 months. If you have a new exhibit on dinosaurs, you might want to do a targeted email campaign to these parents or grandparents touting the interactive features of this exhibit.

Are there other benefits of CRM?

Dave: Absolutely. In addition to being a marketing tool, CRM can maximize fundraising and donation opportunities for nonprofits. It can also give insight into the viability of commercial opportunities such as sponsorships, or events and conferences. Plus, with an integrated approach like Gateway’s CRM Plus, it can reduce administrative burden by providing that crucial 360° view of the customer through one solution.

Tell me about CRM Plus | Powered by Galaxy, what makes it unique over other CRM software?

Dave: A lot. It’s next-generation customer relationship management. The secret is in the seamless integration with Galaxy® point-of-sale software. Galaxy is where all the purchase and usage history lives for customers, members and donors – from ticket or retail purchases on-site at your venue to online ordering of tickets, meal packages and more. This information is fed back real-time into CRM Plus, allowing an invaluable snapshot of your customers at any moment.

CRM Plus also enables you to develop powerful, configurable workflows that automate customer touchpoints such as pre- and post-visit emails. To ensure the right message is getting to the right people at the right time, CRM Plus has insightful segmentation capabilities that allow you to group similar customers together to deliver highly personalized marketing messages. Finally, CRM Plus integrates with commonly used platforms including email providers, social media and other web applications providing a continuous feedback loop.

How would you summarize customer relationship management and CRM Plus?

Dave: CRM is a strategy supported by technology. And CRM Plus | Powered by Galaxy is the only technology that provides a real-time 360° customer view through one solution.