The aim of the study is to evaluate the customer expectations and workplace efficiency of tourism industry in the competitive market environment. For this purpose, house of quality is applied to measure the relative importance of the customer expectations and to rank the workplace efficiency based on customer needs using the fuzzy systems. A set of criteria for the customer expectations and workplace efficiency is defined with the supported literature to weight and rank the factors. Fuzzy DEMATEL is applied for weighting the criteria and fuzzy VIKOR is used for ranking the technical factors of competitive tourism industry. The findings show that tourism companies should mainly focus on designing services for the customers to use easily. In this context, website of the tourism companies should be redeveloped so that the users should understand all details regarding the tourism companies much easily. In addition, technological competency should be provided by the tourism companies to increase their competitive power.
TopIntroduction
Tourism industry has many benefits for the economic conditions of the countries. First of all, it has an increasing effect on the amount of foreign currencies in the country. This situation provides a significant advantage for the countries because countries can have important losses in case of high currency exchange rate when they have foreign debt. Another important benefit of the tourism industry is that it provides job opportunities to the people. In other words, this industry has a decreasing influence on the unemployment rates of the countries (Yabuuchi, 2018).
Due to the conditions emphasized above, most of the countries aim to increase the share in the international tourism industry. This condition leads to higher competition in this industry. Therefore, these countries aim to increase the competitive power for this issue. In this circumstance, the essential point is that the strategies adopted by the countries should be appropriate with the purpose. Otherwise, it becomes impossible to survive in such a competitive industry (Mackay and Spencer, 2017). In this framework, customer expectations have a key role. If the customers become happy with the service of the tourism companies, they will be willing to work with these companies in the future. It can be understood that this condition provides a competitive advantage for these companies and even for these countries.
In addition to the customer expectations, technological factors are also essential for the tourism companies. In other words, tourism companies should have effective technological infrastructure to increase their sales volumes. While using effective technology, these companies can analyze the demographic factors of the customers. This situation can be very helpful for tourism companies to provide quality services according to the customer expectations.
Moreover, it is obvious that customer requirements and technologic capacity of the companies should be examined for the success of the tourism industry. However, the important point in this framework is that effective methodology should be selected for this purpose. The main reason is that by implementing inappropriate methodology, there is a risk of reaching wrong results. This situation can also cause to implement inappropriate strategies by the tourism companies.
House of quality is the methodology which considers both customer expectations and workplace efficiency. In the first stages, customer demands are defined, and planning matrix is created. After that, quality criteria are also determined. Next, there is a benchmarking between technological capacity and satisfying the customer demands. It can be seen that this methodology is very appropriate for tourism industry in order to evaluate customer requirements and technologic capacity of the companies.
The main purpose of this study is to make analysis of the customer-based workplace efficiency in the competitive tourism industry. In this context, the house of quality methodology is taken into consideration. For this purpose, 6 different factors of customer expectations and workplace efficiency for the tourism industry are defined based on different dimensions. In addition to them, they are weighted by fuzzy DEMATEL whereas workplace efficiency is ranked by considering fuzzy VIKOR approach.
It is possible to talk about different novelties of this study. First of all, using house of quality approach increases the appropriateness of the results. Moreover, fuzzy DEMATEL and fuzzy VIKOR methods are firstly used in this study in the scope of the effectiveness in tourism industry. With the help of these models, successful results can be reached under the complex environment. Another contribution of this study is that a set of criteria for customer expectations and workplace efficiency are presented for the tourism industry. These factors provide opportunities to the tourism companies to focus on with the aim of increasing sales.
This study contains five parts. This first section gives an introduction regarding the concept of effectiveness in tourism industry. Additionally, in the second section, literature is reviewed to understand the results of the studies in this framework. The third section includes explanatory information about the fuzzy DEMATEL and fuzzy VIKOR approaches. Also, analysis results are given in the fourth section. On the other side, necessary recommendations are given finally.