May 2014 - EasyMerlin

Taking care of your biggest asset – the customer

These days there is much talk about CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and the notion from the acronym is always customer services or in our vacation ownership industry, member services.

The reality is that CRM or MRM (Member Relationship Management) is not only answering the phone promptly and taking care of member inquires. Even allowing members to make online reservations, process loan or maintenance fee payments or displaying their contract details on your web site is today pretty standard activity.

Don’t get me wrong all these are marvelous things to be able to do for our members, but they are simply not enough.

We live in a totally customer driven economy. The customer, or in our case the members, are now highly sophisticated and knowledgeable due to Internet content on almost every topic they are looking for.

Ahead in the clouds

Whether a single, multi-site or mixed-use operation, most resorts will have data stored on multiple systems which don’t talk directly to each other. Using Cloud technology, Merlin Software has a fully integrated software solution to streamline all aspects of resort management efficiently – meaning resorts of all sizes can get ahead in the clouds.

A single database is what every resort operation should be working from, according to Mike Pnematicatos, founder of software solutions provider, Merlin. Having been in the timeshare industry since 1983, when he became involved in resort development, the frustration and extra work created by using several disparate systems vicariously linked to each other inspired him to develop his own software in 1987, which launched in 2006. The software development was based on 17 years’ experience of resort operations, from sales through to day-to-day management.

Merlin is the only complete enterprise timeshare software system to be cloud-based and served on demand over the Internet. Users can access their Merlin accounts securely, via a web browser, anywhere with an Internet connection.

Making cloud computing less cloudy

You want your resort to be as efficient and profitable as possible.

You know that you will need software to do this and that means business applications. But these can be very expensive and complex requiring an in-house data centre with licenses, servers, storage, networking equipment and IT staff.

And you pay for this upfront and then you pay again for upgrades as they are released plus more backup, security systems, extra storage, new staff….

This is the traditional way of running a business. Technology, however, has moved on. With the advent of cheap broadband it became clear that businesses don’t need in-house data centres. They also don’t need to be near the computer running the application as only a fast Internet connection is needed between them.

The result of this is the development of cloud computing and software as a service. And it changes everything.