The impact of IT-enabled customer service systems on service personalization, customer service perceptions, and hotel performance
Gabriele Piccoli,
Tsz-Wai Lui and
Bettina Grün
Tourism Management, 2017, vol. 59, issue C, 349-362
Abstract:
Customer service is a critical element of a hotel's strategy and an important lever for differentiation of the hotel's offer. Over the last two decades, information systems have contributed to the transformation of customer interactions, enabling an unprecedented scale and scope of service personalization in the tourism industry. This paper reports the results of a mixed method study in a hotel that offers three contributions to the development and refinement of IT-enabled service personalization theory. It explores the role of signifiers in the design of customer service systems, showing that they significantly increase customer preference elicitation during the learning phase of the service personalization process. It then demonstrates that improved preference elicitation translates into higher customer service evaluations and value perceptions of the hotel. Finally, our study shows that IT-enabled service personalization creates financial benefits for the hotel via revenue share-shift from costly intermediated to direct distribution channels.
Keywords: Service personalization; IT-enabled customer service systems; Affordance; System design; Share shift (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026151771630156X
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:touman:v:59:y:2017:i:c:p:349-362
DOI: 10.1016/j.tourman.2016.08.015
Access Statistics for this article
Tourism Management is currently edited by Chris Ryan
More articles in Tourism Management from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().