بررسی اجتماعی مدیریت ارتباط با مشتری در میان هتل های ایرلندی Examining social customer relationship management among Irish hotels

1. Introduction Despite representing a strategic imperative in the hotel industry (Padilla-Meléndez and Garrido-Moreno, 2014; Rahimi, 2017), several hotels have experienced customer relationship management (CRM) failures (Rahimi and Gunlu, 2016). Whereas previous research has documented several reasons for the failure of traditional CRM technologies (Jayachandran et al., 2005; Trainor, 2012), nascent CRM research is investigating the role of social technologies in achieving success. The proliferation of social media has important implications for the hospitality industry. Social media has led to information-rich and empowered customers within a value cocreation ecosystem (Hennig-Thurau et al., 2010). “Social media have become a valuable resource for tourists’ experiences, where they can explicitly show their qualitative experience as well as their satisfaction/dissatisfaction with tangible attributes concerning a destination” (González-Rodríguez et al., 2016, pp. 19-20). This user-generated content can significantly influence the travel decisions of other customers (Viglia et al., 2016). In short, social networking sites (SNSs) are having a transformative effect in the hospitality industry. They are altering and inverting the manner in which customers collect information in the purchase decision-making process (Li and Chang, 2016). Social media technologies proffer hotels a means of monitoring not only customer reviews but also a platform to proactively respond to them to demonstrate their commitment to customer satisfaction (Kim et al., 2016; Xie et al., 2016). The key benefit of social technologies lies in the ability to capitalise on high-level, real-time interactions taking place among groups of customers in social networks. Firms can now become a part of these interactions and enhance customer engagement through the co-creation of value (Trainor, 2012). Value co-creation, the joint creation of value between a company and its customers (Vargo et al., 2008), “finds particular significance in the tourism and hospitality context given its inherent nature as a potentially proactive service provider” (Chathoth et al., 2016, p. 231). Hence, social CRM, “the integration of traditional customer-facing activities including processes, systems, and technologies with emergent social media applications to engage customers in collaborative conversations and enhance customer relationships” (Trainor, 2012, p. 319), is of particular value to the hospitality and tourism industry, given the centrality of the customer experience to success (Chathoth et al., 2012; Hwang and Seo, 2016; Shaw et al., 2011). Research in hospitality has assessed issues such as the capabilities necessary to integrate social media into CRM (Sigala, 2016), SNSs and relationship termination (Gretzel and Dinhopl, 2014), hotel guest acceptance of social CRM (tom Dieck et al., 2017) and the effects of crowdvoting on hotels (Garrigos-Simon et al., 2017). Wider research has focused largely on determining the antecedents of social CRM, conceptualising social CRM and assessing the direct effects of social CRM on performance (Choudhury and Harrigan, 2014; Diffley and McCole, 2015; Trainor et al., 2014).