Abstract
This chapter presents the utilization of optimization techniques in the hospitality and tourism industry; the perspectives on customer service and customer service teams; customer service and service leadership; customer service behavior in the travel industry; the overview of customer experience; customer experience, customer satisfaction, and service quality in the airline industry; customer experience and budget hotel in the hospitality industry; the issues with customer orientation; and the relationship between customer orientation and service innovation in the hotel industry. Optimization techniques are the essential approaches to many real-world problems, and can be applied to promote the performance of hospitality and tourism industry regarding customer service, customer experience, and customer orientation. The chapter argues that enhancing customer service, customer experience, and customer orientation through optimization techniques has the potential to increase organizational performance and reach strategic goals in the hospitality and tourism industry.
TopBackground
Customer service is a direct result of the connection between sales activities and the delivery process, which begins with the order and ends with the delivery, but in some cases it continues with the post-purchase stage of the product usage (Fawcett, Mcleish, & Ogden, 1992). Brohman et al. (2009) indicated that customer service is a key component of a firm's value proposition and a fundamental driver of differentiation and competitive advantage in nearly every industry. Managing both technologies and customer service teams, multichannel customer support creates an operational challenge in modern business (Froehle, 2006).
Customer experience refers to the sensory, emotional, and cognitive impacts generated by customers following participatory and observational experiences, which elevates their interest, motivations, and recognition, and subsequently adds value to the brand communities (Kim & Perdue, 2013). Customer experience can be incorporated into customers' lives to produce perspectives consistent with those of the customer and citizen, or create the modes of thinking, thus creating the tangible revenue for enterprises and intangible reputation for governments (Bruhn et al., 2014). Customer experience is essential because experience is the psychological perception in the experiences of users, and affects usage behaviors (Hsu & Tsou, 2011).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Marketing: The social and managerial processes by which individuals or companies obtain what they need or want through creating, offering, and exchanging the products with each other.
Customer Service: All interactions between a customer and a product provider at the time of sales.
Customer Satisfaction: The degree of satisfaction provided by the products or services of a company as measured by the number of repeat customers.
Purchase Intention: A plan to purchase the particular products or services in the future.
Service quality: An evaluation of how well the delivered service conforms to the customer expectations.
Optimization: The investigation of an alternative with the most cost effective or highest achievable performance under the given constraints, by maximizing desired factors and minimizing undesired ones.
Customer Orientation: A group of actions taken by a business to support its sales and service staff in considering customer requirements.