NB: This is a guest article by Dimitrios Buhalis, deputy director at the International Centre for Tourism and Hospitality Research and Nicolas Gregori, PhD researcher, both from Bournemouth University.
Developments in information and communication technologies are boosting the pace of change in the tourism and hospitality industry and the pressure to compete for customers on a global scale is increasing constantly.
At the same time, consumer needs are changing quickly and their demands are getting more complex and sophisticated.
Moreover, by embracing social media tools and real-time communication over the Internet consumers are more empowered than ever before.
There is a new coffee to wake up to and smell each morning.
The tourism industry does not have the luxury of responding and adapting their service offerings over long periods of time any more.
Hence, valuable brands have to tackle this challenge, as their success or failure depends increasingly on the agility, flexibility and the competitive speed at which they respond to the dynamic changes in customers’ needs.
This in turn requires a real-time understanding and awareness of consumers’ preferences and needs. Increasingly competitive advantage will depend on the ability of organisations to engage interactively with their global consumers.
However, the development and redesign of service offerings, as a response to changes in consumers’ preferences, is a long lasting and iterative process. It requires an in-depth understanding of consumers’ true wants and needs, and once created constant adaptation based on consumers’ feedback is necessary.
Given the slow speed of the development process and the incorporation of customer feedback into existing offerings, tourism organisations are limited in their capabilities to respond quickly to dynamic changes in demand and customer requirements.
Against this background social media acts a catalyst of change.
Micro-blogging, context based services, and dynamic social media platforms offer companies the possibility to instantly engage with their customers at all stages of the travel planning (before, during, after), to gain deep insights into tourists wants and needs in almost real-time and retrieve direct feedback.
Therefore, by monitoring social media, tourism and hospitality tourism and companies are enabled to create a "nervous system" that senses the dynamic changes in customer wants and needs constantly. This has far reaching implications for the management of hospitality and tourism services.
Embracing real-time enabled technologies allows proactive responses to customers’ desires by creating flexible and agile services on the spot or by adapting existing service offerings instantly.
Also it increases the speed of customer feedback loops and therefore provides opportunities for both the identification and successful recovery of service failures. A plethora of consumer studies has shown that the vast majority of travellers (85%-95%) don’t actually voice complaints.
In addition, the "service recovery paradox" tells us that customers, who have experienced a successful service recovery are on average more satisfied than consumers, who did not experience any service failure at all.
Real-time social media enabled service management is key to achieving growth and service excellence in a highly competitive market.
NB: This is a guest article by Dimitrios Buhalis, deputy director at the International Centre for Tourism and Hospitality Research and Nicolas Gregori, PhD researcher, both from Bournemouth University.
NB2: The International Federation for IT in Travel and Tourism (IFITT) is holding a FREE workshop (Technology and Social Media-enabled Real-Time Service Management in Tourism and Hospitality) on Monday 7 November 2011 at World Travel Market in London, 10am to 12am, Platinum Suite 1. More details.