Customer Experience Management In Hospitality Industry

Customer Persona

Discuss about the Woolworth Customer Experience Management.

Customer experience refers to the entire interaction of a customer with a product or services and the company. Therefore customer experience management refers to the management of the entire interaction of a customer with a product and services to build a strong mutual relationship resulting in customer satisfaction and loyalty (Rajaobelina,2018). The entire management relies on the three 3Ps that are: people, process, and the product. The paper explores the customer experience in hospitality industry with a focus on the Woolworth supermarket

Woolworth Group is An Australian Supermarket Chain that supplies various products in various countries such as New Zealand (Graulich, 2015)).  And have to affiliate in various countries such as South Africa and the UK. The company customers are segmented into the following: preferential, occasional and passers-by. The preferential customers are the ones that have to dedicate a certain percentage of their salary to make their monthly purchase.  The occasional purchasers are those that do go into the supermarket once in a while, and the passersby are the ones that either do impact buying or just because they were passing by (Battini et al., 2010).

Customer persona refers to the marketing aspect that has fictional representation of ideal customer. The internalization of the ideal customer helps the business to relate the product and the customer after an understanding of the buyer’s feelings, nature of buying, likes and many other aspects (Idoughi, Seffah & Kolski, 2012). The customer persona helps business operators to message, develop product and services to achieve full customer satisfaction through personalization. The improved customer satisfaction eventually leads to customer loyalty(Joshi, Waghela & Patel, 2015). The customer persona can be created through research, interviews, surveys of the targeted customers to collect the required information.

Customer Experience and Journey Map

Customer experience strategy refers to the ability to have a clear focus on the customer vision that is compatibles with the organizations r business objectives(Tuunanen & Govindji, 2016). The customer experience is created by capturing the customer feedback and using the available tools to develop a proper strategy theta will ensure that all the customer’s concerns are addressed.

Discounted Transport to preferential customers -The discounted transport to the preferred purchase that does bulk buying every month in the Woolworth will reduce their expense on the transport and at the same time will attract more customers to be frequent in the retail shop.

Customer Journey Map

Small gifts to the occasional purchaser-The proposition by a business to offer small gifts to the occasional purchasers helps in motivating the customers to increase the percentage of frequency hence increasing the number of the purchaser in the retails market.

Customer loyalty is the unwavering customer’s believe in a particular product or organization achieved after effective experience and good relationship with the organization (Gjekanoviki, 2015). Customer loyalty is achieved through various ways such as   IDIC models.  IDIC is an approach used by organizations to build customer relationship on the internet and was developed by Pepper and Rogers. The IDIC comprises four actions on the customers that are: customer Identification, Differentiation, Interaction, and Customization.

Customer identification focuses on the urge to identify each customer on the initial visits through the use of cookies or asking a customer to log into the hotel or organization site. (Saetang & Pathomsrikul, 2016) Through logging in the customer information such as contact, name and other additional information is captured through the process known as “Drip Irrigation.”  During this process, the customers are always unaware as the information is always tapped at the information technology department. The obtained information is used by to create a profile for each of the customers a process known as customer identification depending on their needs. Customer identification helps in understating customers and spotting the top customers, largest customers and non-profitable customers (Cerr, 2012).

After the identification of the customers into different categories, the organization goes further and engages every customer through a process known as customer interaction. The interactions provide onsite customer service questions to capture the feelings of the customers that are delivered through customers preferred channels such as email, or phone calls. Finally, customer customization refers to the varied ways of personalizing the contents or messages about the segmentation created.

IDIC helps in identifying the customers according to their needs and assist the organization/hotel prices the customer’s expectations, thereby working on various aspects to ensure satisfaction (Jiang et al.,2017). Various aspects that can be captured are such as the price of the product/food/room and the quantity needed. With the information, the hotel is capable of providing discount and subsidy on the services and products sought by the customer to create the first impression.  The customer’s feedback can be reviewed, and recommendations addressed This can also be further reviewed depending on the nature and frequency of purchase. Those customers that do bulk buying, or frequent purchases tend to have normalized prices than single purchasers, this in return create a mutual relationship.

Customer Experience Strategy

Value proposition refers to the marketing report that an organization applies to summarize reasons why a consumer should purchase a product or a  service(Ming-Ten, Chung-Lin & Han-Chao, 2010). The report always persuades the prospective customer that the suggested product or service will add more value or solve other problems.

The value proposition for the Preferential purchasers-The construction of conference hall that is capable of holding about 300 will capture the Tala Weaver and other business operator more opportunities to hold their meetings within the facility and save their worries of spending the night in the hotel and holding a conference in another venue(Latif & Khan, 2016). Having three conferences within a week with above 300 packs, the company is capable of improving revenue and improving the customer’s experience. Averagely the hotel will be making about $ 900,000 per week translating into about $ 3,200000.

The value proposition for the potential customers-With the initiative of the transport services to the potential customers to the various homes within a range of 500 will reduce the customer’s worries of looking for other means of transport that tend to charge high and at times are always inconvenient. The inconvenience caused by the public and the taxi results in poor customer experience, therefore with the introduction of the transportation service, both the customers and organization will gain. The customer will be using $ 30 per 1 Km, while with our service the customer will be paying $ 25, saving about $ 5 resulting in customer loyalty

The value proposition for the occasional purchasers -The idea of gifting the occasional customer will cost the Woolworth some amount of money at the start, but with the success of the strategy, more customers will be attracted hence increasing the number of the potential purchasers, in the long run, it will add value to Woodworth revenue.

The customer service experience will focus on three different categories that are preferential, occasional and passer-by will lead to specialization of the services. The specialization on three brands will increase the market command of the hotel. Each customer will be pleased with the new strategy, for example the provision of adequate and reliable shopping mall enables the passer-by to have whatever they need through their journey.

Customer experience can be measured using different tools that will lead to better customer retention, reduced operation cost, and increased sales and faster growth of a company these are mobiles customer support, social media support tool and customer feedback survey.

Value Proposition

Mobile Customer Support-Mobile customer support is the application of mobile phone devices to develop the customer experience (Shang et al., 2018). The tool is popular since quite a large number of customers have mobile phones hence making the interaction a between customer a business a constant activity through calls and messaging.

Social Media Support-Social media entails the internet platforms such as Facebook, Twitter Instagram among others, where people tend to group together and here their experiences through posts of pictures and conversation (Haripriya, Asiff & Jahnavi, 2018).

Customer Feedback Survey-Customer feedback surveys are short questions administered to customers after every experience. The short questions always collect information about customers feeling about a particular product and services(Song et al.,2017) 

Customer-centric is the process of being organization placing customers first and proptize in providing exceptional customer experience to gain a large number of customers for a competitive ability (Kirkwood, 2015). The steps followed are: making customer satisfaction an organizational value through addressing all the issues raised by customers and by rewarding employees for customer satisfaction (Younghee, Won-Moo & Minsung,2012). Then the creation of awareness of organization through marketing by getting everyone in the organization get involved in the process while hiring and firing employees for customer satisfaction, lastly, the organization should celebrate customer satisfaction

The management should create a service culture that will ensure that all the three brands of services are to the highest quality so as to retain the existing and attract new customers. This can be achieved through personalization of every  potential customer.

Today marketers are under pressure in trying to understand customers’ needs and provide customer experience since advertising does not perform enough. Therefore customer centric-organization is the solution. The process entails:

Power of co-design- entails the process of designing a brand that creates a close relationship with the customer and is incapable of altering the power. Customer-focused leadership- the leadership of the organization should focus on delivering the promised experience to the customer. Customer feedback process- there should be an effective way of receiving the customer feedback since are important in creating and improving of the customer experience,

Conclusion

Customers are the critical pillars of business growth; therefore good or poor service influences the business command on the market. Customer expectations keep on changing, varied and are always higher, thus servicing one to the fullest is difficult. Customer experience travels faster than word of mouth. Therefore it is upon the business to learn how to build a purposeful customer experience strategy. Customer loyalty is easy to achieve whole it is difficult to maintain. Therefore, organizations should work toward creating a customer-centric organization to maintain and increase the number of potential customers.

References

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