A NEW OPTION FOR CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT OF TOURISM UNITS: CROWDSOURCING

Cristina State and Dan Popescu

Proceedings of the INTERNATIONAL MANAGEMENT CONFERENCE, 2014, vol. 8, issue 1, 1-13

Abstract: It has been demonstrated. Tourism can have an important contribution to the realisation of the gross domestic product of any country. However, in the context in which, on one hand, the media frequently reports about many successes of domestic tourism but, on the other hand, it only contributes with 0.6% to Romania's GDP, we wanted to investigate to what extent “it is is rather, “it seems…Therefore, based on the available statistical data, result of an increasingly aggressive but, however, under-performing external organisational communication, we want to analyse to what extent the beneficiaries of the services provided by the tourism units (clients) are indeed satisfied with the correspondence between their offer and the reality 'on the field'.Methodologically, in a first stage, we used crowdsourcing. This is an alternative to obtain, due to the outsourcing, necessary services and/or ideas, by asking for contributions from large groups of people and/or from communities, using on-line resources rather than employees or traditional suppliers. In this context, we launched, on two websites that are accessible to any person willing to participate in our research, two questionnaires: one for assessing the quality of organisational communication within the tourism units, and another for assessing the level of satisfaction of their clients. As a second step, we proceeded with the interpretation of the answers received by verifying, econometrically, through the variance analysis (ANOVA), the research hypotheses. Basically, we investigated the two-way relationship existing between the tourism units and the beneficiaries of their services, in order to identify and improve several tendencies of external organisational communication, tendencies that can generate successful effects, as a direct result of improving customer relationship management. At the end of our paper, we have formulated a series of proposals designed to reveal how and in what way - in a world where globalisation, internationalisation and interdependence are more and more obvious - the crowdsourcing, as a managerial and methodological element and as an attribute of the assessment and control function, can not only be an alternative, but also a viable solution capable to substantially contribute to the improvement of the customer relationship management in the industry of tourism and hospitality and, implicitly, to the improvement of the services provided to the clients.

Date: 2014
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