Master the Entire Customer Experience
Selling a product isn’t the beginning of a company’s relationship with customers;
that starts when they first become aware of its brand. Equally, the relationship doesn’t end at
the point of sale, because every interaction with customers is an opportunity to foster their
loyalty or lose their future business.3 Customer solutions in the travel industry often span
multiple players, providing each with an opportunity to showcase its strengths and make a
case for becoming a traveller’s favourite. Some companies are actively seeking to forge tighter
bonds with customers: for example, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines will soon launch a service
that allows its passengers use their Face book or LinkedIn profiles to choose eat mates on
upcoming flights. Malaysia Airlines is releasing a Face book service that lets travellers check
if friends are on their same flight or headed to their same destination.
Like British Airways’
use of the iPod, these innovations deploy technology to shape
the customer experience, not just to conduct booking and customer service transactions.
A critical prerequisite for influencing the customer experience is the dissolution of
organizational barriers—not only budgets and planning processes but also ownership of
information—to gain a comprehensive view of the customer journey. There should be a single
customer databank, not separate ones for information on loyalty, transactions, and pricing.
And to make the customer-centric approach a reality, unprecedented levels of coordination
among multiple business units (including those responsible for loyalty programs, pricing,
sales, marketing, and information technology) are also required. Far too few companies in
the travel sector have taken the steps needed to achieve this level of unification.
The Concerns and Worries
Anju Gupta (2012) has reported some of the grey areas of electronic tourism. She
reported some of the worries concerning ICT application in tourism which are mentioned
below.
➢➢ Inadequate and unreliable telecommunication information.
➢➢ ICTs do not guarantee profitability unless their adoption is related to the company’s
strategy.
➢➢ The cost involved with adopting and using ICTs.
➢➢ The lack of relevant knowledge and skills.
➢➢
Tourism especially in India is relatively young and is not well organized to absorb
the advances in information technology. They generally lack technical and financial
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resources and their scale of operation is too limited to take advantage of information
technology.
➢➢ There has not been any specific policy or coordinated approach so far for the
development of information products on tourism at the national level in India. It is
yet to be evolved and implemented.
➢➢ The information industry in India presently consists of a few software development
firms and some information centre in the government sector.
However there are no database vendors in India who prepare their own databases
and market them. In the absence of such units, all efforts are government dominated and
the products are generally not available in the market. It is therefore essential to provide
adequate government support and incentives for the development of such industry in India.
(Anju Gupta, 2012)
The Future Trends of Ict-Basedtourism
Overall, consumers benefited the most as their bargaining power increased due
to their ability to access accurate and relevant information instantly and to communicate
directly with suppliers, while benefiting from lower switching costs. The Internet led to
the intensification of rivalry among tourism suppliers as it introduced transparency, speed,
convenience and a wide range of choice and flexibility in the marketplace (Buhalis & Jun,
2011).
Transparency enabled buyers to increase their bargaining power by facilitating price
comparisons and access to instant, inexpensive and accurate information but reduced the
bargaining power of suppliers. Rivalry was further intensified because of lowered barriers to
entry and because of the possibility of equal representation of small businesses. Innovative
suppliers increasingly use advanced CRM to gather information on consumers’ profile and
to offer tailored and value added products whilst expanding their distribution mix widely to
harness the marketplace. Suppliers should enhance their direct communications with end
consumers and online intermediaries to save on costs, increase profitability and enhance
their efficiency. Real time representation facilitated instant distribution and led to bypassing
the traditional distribution channels. This not only changed the structure of the tourism
value system but also raised challenges for traditional intermediaries ( Buhalis & Jun, 2011).
The need for traditional intermediaries to shift their role to consumer advisors
is becoming evident and unless TAs and TOs utilise internet tools for building and
delivering personalised tourism products they will be unable to compete in the future.
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Although the tourism industry structure has been altered dramatically it is evident that
both tourism suppliers and online intermediaries should apply constant innovation, in
terms of marketing techniques and technological advancements, in order to be able to
offer differentiated, personalised, tailored and value added products. The key point for
sustaining their competitive advantage is to focus on their core competencies and to exploit
the opportunities that technology offers to improve their strategic position in the tourism
value system (Buhalis& Jun, 2011).
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