Hilton Hotels Corporation Case

GBMP 508

CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT

HILTON HOTELS: BRAND DIFFERENTIATION

DATE - 03/20/2012

SUBMITTED BY

GIBIN JOSEPH ZACHARIAH

STUD # - 820-334-092

1. What is Hilton's core business? What is the value of a brand in the lodging industry?

Hilton Hotels Corporation is a global hospitality company. Perhaps it is the most recognizable name in the lodging industry. Hilton offered significant recognition and customer traffic with their advertisements, programs and electronic distribution systems. The company is responsible for delivering the guest experience on property and abiding by the brand standards. Brand values have a lot to do in lodging industry. For instance two companies selling similar product at a same price. Yet people tend to buy one product more. If the question is why the answer is brand value of the product. There are various aspects that determine a brand value. This can be quality, premium price, higher market share or even a positive image. In the case of lodging industry, once the customer have a bitter experience with the service they are never going to come back to stay at the same place anymore. The brand value in this industry is more over attained through word of mouth. If a customer gets a quality service obviously he will recommend the place for his known one's too. That's how a strong brand image is built in lodging industry. The brand should create values in customers mind by helping to assure them of a uniform level of quality. Then the customer becomes loyal to the brand.

2. Evaluate the performance of the Customers Really Matter initiative to date.

The nervous system of Hilton Hotels Corporation was a comprehensive and integrated infrastructure known as OnQ which is custom built enterprise system designed to support the property-level operations if each hotel in Hilton Corporation to enable Customers Really Matter initiative at each customer touch point. The essence of the initiative was that CRM is a way to use technology to give you the power to solidify the relationship with the best customers. It took $650,000 to build OnQ and yearly maintenance was estimated to around $1M. Before there were barriers to good service as information was not integrated and easily available, time taken in call centres were longer, they couldn't give continuity to guests who stayed in multiple brands and also if the customers had a bad experience in their previous stay they