Strategic analysis of customer relationship management—a field study on hotel enterprises

Abstract

The value of a customer relationship is well recognized by many leading companies, especially by those in the service sector. For high quality hotel enterprises, application of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a great opportunity to increase customer value and provides a way to systematically attract, acquire and retain customers. The main purpose of this study is to provide a framework to review the strategic analysis related to customer connections in high quality hotel enterprises. This study has taken high quality hotel enterprises in Taiwan as an example to perform a field study. A strategic CRM framework based on Wayland and Cole's model is introduced in order to classify the subjects from a customer- oriented perspective. From the responses of the surveyed high quality hotel enterprises in Taiwan, it is demonstrated how they can develop their customer connection strategies based on their current and future positions in four dimensions of the value compass model. In this way, the field study shows that there is still a considerable amount of space for high quality hotel enterprises in Taiwan to improve their knowledge about customers further and put some more efforts into seizing the opportunity of informed pursuit of continuous quality improvement and business excellence. In the future, customer relationship management and knowledge management together will help businesses accumulate customer knowledge, build up better relationships between them and their customers, enhance customer satisfaction and achieve business excellence.