The Challenge
A single contact centre handles enquiries for all 17 Cinnamon properties. As volumes grew, agents were opening a guest record with no view of that guest’s previous stays, conversations or preferences, and were spending the first part of each enquiry assembling context rather than resolving it. Email traffic sat outside Salesforce altogether, so nobody could see how much of it there was or how quickly it was being answered.
The underlying cause was structural. Cinnamon’s commercial model is deliberately complex: a single corporate client can generate leisure bookings, an event enquiry and a wedding across three properties, handled by three teams. Those teams worked separately, so no record showed the full relationship. Part of one of Sri Lanka’s largest business groups, Cinnamon Hotels also had guest interactions sitting across sister companies in retail, travel and financial services that Salesforce could not see.
Marketing hit the same wall. Every campaign was built by hand, which ruled out sending anything at short notice, a weather warning, a reassurance message during disruption, to a targeted audience. Corporate sales teams, who spend much of their time in the field with travel partners and event organisers, had no single account view to prepare from.
The Solution
Cloud Spectrum started with the business rather than the requirements document. The team spent its opening weeks on site, sitting with contact centre agents, marketers and sales staff to see how the work was done before proposing what should change. Previous partners had scoped and delivered; this engagement began by asking what would make Cinnamon Hotels more successful.
The two teams then rebuilt the Salesforce data model around how the business actually runs. That work forced conversations between groups who had never had to agree on a shared definition of an account, and those conversations became as valuable as the configuration. Cloud Spectrum also got the platform working inside a demanding early timeframe, which mattered: confidence in Salesforce had to be re-earned before anyone would build on it.
The solution included:
- Service Cloud for the contact centre - past stays, conversations, preferences and open enquiries on one screen, with email brought inside Salesforce for the first time across all 17 properties.
- Marketing Cloud guest journeys - confirmations, pre-arrival welcomes, in-stay messages and post-stay follow-ups, timed to the booking and consistent across every property.
- Training that made Cinnamon’s own marketers self-sufficient. They now build and send time-sensitive campaigns, disaster notifications, reassurance messaging during disruption, without waiting on a partner.
- One account view for corporate sales, pulling bookings, conversations and engagement history together across properties so a salesperson walks into a meeting already briefed.
- A consent-driven Data Cloud layer, now in build, to unify guest interactions across the wider group so personalisation stays inside what each guest has agreed to.
- Knowledge transfer as a deliverable, not a handover document. Cloud Spectrum worked on site as well as remotely, and key Cinnamon staff went on to pass Salesforce Administrator certification.
The Result
Full visibility of email communications increased email conversations tenfold and improved response times by 25% within two months. Guests are recognised the moment they make contact, and agents can focus on listening and helping rather than searching for information.
Across all 17 properties, guest journeys report an average open rate of 65% and a click-to-open rate of around 9%. The more durable marketing change is who does the work: ad-hoc campaigns to targeted audiences, which the team previously could not run at all, are now built in-house and sent the same day.
For corporate sales, relationships with global partners and travel brands are now managed with the same consistency as individual guest experiences. Opportunities are visible, handovers are smoother, and teams collaborate more effectively across regions and segments.
Internally, Salesforce is now treated as something the business owns rather than something that was delivered to it. Certified administrators sit inside Cinnamon Hotels, so the platform can be changed by the people who use it as the group grows.
