Canyon Ranch Essay

1. What is the value of customer information to Canyon Ranch? Ans. To Canyon Ranch, customer information is must in order to implement their business model successfully. The value that it gives to the business is that it understands customer’s unique wants and give alternatives that will allow each guest to rach their individual goals. This is essential for Canyon Ranch to reach its mission to â€Å"inspire people to make healthy living, turning hopes and live into the highest enjoyment of life†. By gathering and sharing guests’ information, Canyon Ranch can assimilate it to â€Å"know and understand their customers, provides loyalty, and cross-sell its offerings† all of which are highly critical to the success of Canyon Ranch. The VP of Marketing was quoted saying â€Å"everyone experiences a different Canyon Ranch; we’ll meet you where you are†. If the company doesn’t know ‘where that is’, they will never be able to live up to this motto. Their customers are looking for a Luxury-like experience, not a ‘Marriott’ experience. They want unique, custom opportunities and to miss the details related to each customer could cost Canyon Ranch their reasonable edge. Canyon Ranch has been regarded as the â€Å"gold standard in the industry. To uphold this standard, they must know their client better than they see themselves. This is only likely to gather and adapt quality customer information. 2. As CIO, how would you make the case for customer relationship management (CRM) and business intelligence (BI) systems at Canyon Ranch? Canyon Ranch is the gold standard in destination spas and enjoys impressive rates that are much higher than other destination spas, but there are marks of increasing competition. Day spas are aligning themselves with medical expert and offered facilities in nutrition, homeopathy, physical therapy and general medical practice. Also some hospitals were starting to provide spa treatments and wellness centers with nutritionists. Canyon Ranch is now faced with demands as to how to raise the business while keeping the fundamental characteristics of Canyon Ranch. From an IT position, Canyon Ranch has basic systems for the business to function although they are not very effective. The CLS based system is used to record transactional data  while client preferences, support incident, rapid response etc. used Guestware. is not integrated well with CLS. The program coordinator, who persisted as the contact person for the quest through their stay, did not always have all of the data ahead of ti me. There is no POS software in the restaurant or the salon, hold up the Ranch of a chance to compile and track sales data. Canyon Ranch’s each business unit is committed on improving the level of customer service and personalization. As a CIO I would make central IT infrastructure so that all the figures is shared at every Canyon Ranch branch so that where every a customer goes he is not treated as new if he has visited it before. Create a Point of Sale software that leads to traceable value of purchase. If any customer wants to just buy a product then he can buy it rather than taking whole services. Increase direct marketing and communication to self decision making software that recognizes the pattern of customer visit and reminds him about his upcoming event to celebrate or take service at Canyon Ranch. 3. What impact would you anticipate these systems to have on the Canyon Ranch strategy and capabilities? Ans. The evolution of IT application such as CRM and BI systems will change the business interaction with customers. Canyon Ranch can enhance their historic reliance on word-of-mouth promotion to expand its customer base through social networking. Though Canyon Ranch has property management system that captures some customer data but implementing CRM and BI will make robust system to periodically survey customers, capture sales data and track services. Such integration can increase repeat customer visit, enhance customer personalization and attract new customers. The implantation of BI will allow company to attract profitability of its three segments : Health and Healing, Hotels and Spas. With this intelligence Canyon Ranch will employ cost saving measures, track inventory and monitor resources. Such system will improve capability and enhance productivity. 4. What advice do you have for Canyon Ranch executives? Ans. In the IT area Canyon Ranch still has space to improve. The first thing is to reduce the cost. Canyon Ranch has 2.5:1 staff-to-guest ratio, it also was the advantage in competition. But this will cost too much, Canyon Ranch can use the information technology to decrease the amount of staffs. Some services can be done by the computer like registration or remind services,  sometimes, the guest want their privacy space, at this time the Canyon Ranch should offer guests options to enjoy their private time. In another aspect, the information system can help the staffs to manage the profile of the customers. When the customer checking in the resort, the system will tell the preferences of each customer to the service provider automatically. These data of preferences can also help the Canyon Ranch provides much more projects that fit for customers. For the new customers, it should have a survey system to get the basic preferences. There should have some self-service machines to provide reserve service to the customers, to help them reserve the private spa service by their own. It will decrease the cost of Canyon Ranch and increase the efficiency. It also can attract more customers back to Canyon Ranch again. Another problem in Canyon Ranch is the separating system. The CLS system is the core system that runs the whole company, but the Guestware and POS software cannot connect to the core system. So the plan above cannot be implementing until this applicability problem solved. The good news is the Canyon Ranch owned the source code of CLS system, and it could be customized easily. Canyon Ranch should work with the develop company of CLS to customize the system. So a centralized system should be make that interlinks every branch and segments within it.