Spotlight on Blueground CRM with Maria Avgerinou

At the heart of Blueground’s relationships with its guests, landlords, and more, you’ll find the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) team. But what is CRM exactly and how does it play a critical role at Blueground?

We chatted with Maria Avgerinou, Blueground’s Senior CRM Manager, about the importance of CRM, the challenges of making it successful, and what the future holds for this part of the business.

What is your history with Blueground, and what is your current role?

After eight years in the UK working for e-commerce, retail, and media companies on both agency and client-side, I decided to move back to Greece and joined Blueground in June 2019 as a CRM Marketing Manager. The size of the Marketing team was much smaller than what it is now and mainly based in Athens.

The main focus of the role is the strategy that Blueground follows to manage interactions with our existing and potential customers. CRM (Customer Relationship Management) helps organizations streamline processes, build customer relationships, increase sales, improve customer service, and increase profitability. The initial stand-alone role allowed me to work on both hands-on and strategic projects. Now, we’re a strong team of four, looking after the CRM marketing tools and the online reviews. The team is growing rapidly, and we’re looking for more members to join us in 2023!

What is CRM and why is it essential for companies?

Many companies, when they say, “I need a CRM Manager,” they mean someone who knows how to send out marketing emails. But this is just a part of the job! Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a strategy that companies use to manage interactions with customers and potential customers.

CRM helps organizations streamline processes, build customer relationships, increase sales, improve customer service, and increase profitability. The goal of a CRM system is simple: improve business relationships to grow the business. CRM tools also help companies manage customer relationships across the entire customer lifecycle, at every marketing, sales, e-commerce, and customer service interaction. In fact, there is an improvement of 29% in sales for companies that implement CRM software.

A strong CRM enables the company to deepen its relationships with customers, colleagues, partners, and suppliers. Building good relationships and keeping track of prospects and customers is crucial for customer acquisition, retention, reactivation, and loyalty, which is at the heart of a CRM’s function.

How does CRM impact guests’ experience with Blueground?

From a Marketing perspective, current guests only receive in their inbox relevant information about their Blueground stay, our partnership offers, and Blueground news. We are also interested in their feedback about our product so that we can improve.

The most important objective of our CRM strategy is to add value to our current and potential guests’ journeys and not bombard them with too many different messages.

Care is at the heart of our business and one of our core values. Our ultimate success relies on creating a trusted relationship and a rewarding experience for both our guests and landlords. So we’ll always go the extra mile to deliver great value to them, starting from a simple email in their inbox.

In what ways does Blueground build strong relationships with guests?

We are constantly focusing on this area, and our “guest first” approach is a top priority. To build strong relationships with our guests, we are aiming to learn more about them. We have increased the touchpoints where we ask our guests (and potential guests) to give us more information about their preferences. Once we know more about them, we are able to offer them more personalized and relevant communications. Here are some ways we build stronger relationships with our audience:

• Boost awareness: The first phase of the marketing funnel is about generating awareness among as many people as possible. We target potential and current guests with messages to let them know about our products (Blueground for Business, Landlords schemes etc.), services (Guest App etc.), offers (seasonal offers, partnership offers etc.), and new cities.
• Educate our guests: The journey begins before someone even signs a Blueground contract. When a potential guest opts into our newsletters, we start their journey by letting them know more about Blueground, the prime locations, our apartments’ amenities, and the value of being our guest. Then we keep educating them and showing the value of being part of the Blueground community, by sending them emails with special partnership offers relevant to their stage in their lifecycle journey, including a monthly guest newsletter in which we pick the most relevant blog articles in terms of seasonality and added value for our guests.
• Re-engage with our guests (post check-out): One of the most important parts of the CRM Marketing strategy is how to re-engage with our past guests. That includes asking for guest feedback via surveys or reviews and seeking to collaborate with our guests in different ways — as property investors, corporate travelers, and more. We’re currently using new city launches, product and referral program launches, and seasonal campaigns as well. Plus, we’re working on a more rewards-based strategy to bring past guests back!
• Build automations: Automating as many communications and processes as possible helps to improve the relationship between Blueground and our clients. By automating tasks, we respond to requests faster and avoid mistakes and inconsistency.

What is the most challenging part of making CRM successful?

CRM can be as simple as sending emails out and as complicated as achieving single customer view, multichannel customer journeys, and increasing revenue from personalized rewards and messages. I’m not saying that just sending out emails doesn’t have challenges but the more sophisticated a business wants to be with its CRM the more challenging it becomes. Some of the main challenges I have noticed during my career are:

• The time and cost of implementing CRM software: It takes time, effort, money, training, and organizational culture change.
• Hiring the right CRM solution provider: The right CRM partner is crucial for successful implementation. Choosing a partner that helps in both the implementation and pre-implementation strategy is incredibly important.
• Strategies for adopting CRM software: Without an organized plan of action to encourage adoption, it’s nearly impossible to convert employees to new software users. If you want your company to be successful with CRM, you need a plan for introducing it, setting expectations for employees, and making sure everyone understands how using CRM will help them.

How do you see CRM changing in the future?

Our approach to customer relationship management needs to be flexible, intuitive, and collaborative to be successful. Over the next few years, we’ll likely see some new trends rising. Here are the ones I’m most excited to watch:

• Leverage customer data more and achieve a single customer view: The internet has revolutionized the way we conduct business by increasing connectivity. The future of CRM is no different, as businesses are facing the challenge of disconnected systems and data. To overcome this issue, companies are investing in all-in-one platforms that provide solutions for sales, marketing, web, service, and operations. CRMs will also pull in data from other areas of the business, such as ERP, to provide a unified view of the customer and enable companies to use the data better.
• Personalization: Consumers today have come to expect a high level of personalization. In fact, 86% of customers said they would spend more with companies that personalize their customer service. As a result, all businesses are now being held to this standard of personalized experiences.
• Artificial Intelligence (AI): AI can offer recommendations for enhancing customer service and identifying opportunities for cross-selling or upselling products and services that align with the customer’s needs. The major areas where AI can be applied in CRM include:

Marketing

• Lead Qualification: AI-powered CRM systems can use automation to evaluate the needs of potential leads. Tools such as chatbots and email bots can gather information on what a lead is looking for and inform sales teams, leading to improved performance and more efficient sales processes.
• Sentiment Analysis: Utilize AI to analyze customer interactions during phone calls, determine their emotional state, and cater to their sentiments.

Sales

• Forecasting: Use customer data to identify patterns and gain valuable insights to predict sales, allowing your team to plan and improve processes.
• Customer Churn Reduction: By analyzing specific patterns in customer data, AI can identify the reasons for customer churn, helping you take concrete actions to reduce the churn rate.

Data

• Cleaning: Customer data includes irregularities such as anomalies, duplicates, and more, causing inaccurate predictions. AI-integrated CRM systems can detect potential issues, clean duplicates, search for incomplete data and suggest actions to update old data to help you make improved decisions.
• Entry: AI-integrated CRM systems can help automate repetitive tasks like data entry that automatically capture data from calls, messages, emails, and images and enter customer data in the desired format. This allows employees to focus on high-value tasks.
• Customer Experience: According to a study from 2021, nearly half of organizations worldwide considered CX to be a major competitive advantage, with 40% of customers stating that they would go back to a company with which they had a good experience. In the future, CRM systems will prioritize ease of use and easy access to data analysis. Additionally, there will be a focus on seamless communication between sales, customer service agents, and customers, as well as content tailored to meet customers’ needs.

Interested in joining Blueground? Check out our open roles to find the position that’s right for you.