Innovative service marketing delivery using social media networking: Learning from review websites in the tourism/hospitality industry
This studentship has been awarded to Nicolas Gregori.
Project Title: Innovative service marketing delivery using social media networking: Learning from review websites in the tourism/hospitality industry
First supervisor: Professor Dimitrios Buhalis
Additional supervisors: Dr Miguel Moital and Dr Soo Jun
This research aims to develop insights into customer relationship management for service recovery and service excellence in the dynamic context of social media networking websites. Social networking on line has changed the basis of communications between customers and organisations whilst having revolutionised the principles of brand management. The emerging tools enable organisations to expand their brand footprint and at the same time challenge organisations to reengineer their service delivery across multi channels and perhaps most importantly in public. This generates a need to re-examine customer communication and service in the new environment.
Many companies set up accounts on social networking websites to publicise their business and manage consumer complaints. As companies allocate precious resources to social networking websites, it is important to understand how they manage customer complaints and/or negative perceptions in a real time context of Internet to solve business challenges and achieve service excellence. Of particular interest is service recovery to achieve service excellence through online customer relationship management in the context of the tourism/hotel industry. For example, how do service providers respond to negative customer comments and solve customer dissatisfaction through online social media to achieve service excellence? Research about customer relationship management and service excellence can be drawn from several theoretical perspectives such as social network theory, services marketing and relationship management and relationship marketing. By reviewing these theories in the context of social networking websites, this study aims to develop new insights into service recovery and service excellence strategies for customer management relationship in online environments.
The tourism and hospitality context provides an excellent area to explore innovative service delivery since it is in the forefront of technological adoption. Social networking in the form of review, sites (e.g. tripadvisor), networking (e.g. facebook etc) as well as price comparison websites (e.g. kayak) have revolutionised service delivery and interaction.
To discuss this opportunity further please contact Professor Dimitrios Buhalis
Details of the second call for applications will be published here in due course, so please bookmark this page.
Information on how to apply can be found on the BU research pages.