Chapter 9. Customer Service
9.1 Customer Experience
Overview
While there are many other factors that contribute to the success of a tourism business, one of the easiest to control is customer service levels.
Many of BC’s tourism operations have mastered high and consistent customer service levels. Why and how are they able to do this? What are the characteristics of exceptional customer service and the benefits to the business and the employees? How does technology apply to customer service and how is it constantly evolving?
This chapter will answer these questions as we explore the fundamentals of customer service in the context of a competitive global tourism environment. We will interview experienced tourism professionals, as well study the success of BC’s own customer service program, SuperHost, which has been training BC hospitality professionals for over 35 years.
We will be introducing concepts such as Total Quality (TQ), Net Promoter score and Customer lifetime value (CLV) used to measure customer service impact.
Customer service delivery and experience in today’s economy is becoming increasingly significant owing to change in demographics and psychographics. Words such as “authenticity”, “unique,” “one of a kind,” and “memorable” are being widely used by BC hospitality and tourism businesses to describe their customer experience.
Experience in the hospitality and tourism industry is a word that has been defined by various authors since 1982 until now. In the published article from Godovykh & Tasci (2020), the literature review explores the definition of the word “experience” spanning across various periods of time (Table 9.1).
| Authors | Defined “Experience” as |
|---|---|
| Holbrook and Hirschman (1982, p. 132) | “a steady flow of fantasies, feelings, and fun” |
| Pine and Gilmore (1998, p. 99) | “…are inherently personal, existing only in the mind of an individual who has been engaged on an emotional, physical, intellectual, or even spiritual level” |
| Prahalad and Ramaswamy (2004, p. 8) | “an environment in which consumers can have active dialogue and co-construct personalized experiences” |
| Gentile, Spiller, & Noci (2007, p. 397) | “experience originates from a set of interactions between a customer and a product, a company, or part of its organization, which provoke a reaction” |
| Bagdare and Jain (2013, p. 792) | “the sum total of cognitive, emotional, sensorial, and behavioral responses produced….” |
| Godovykh and Tasci (2020, p. 8) | “the totality of cognitive, affective, sensory, and conative responses, on a spectrum of negative to positive, evoked by all stimuli encountered in pre, during, and post phases of consumption affected by situational and brand-related factors filtered through personal differences of consumers, eventually resulting in differential outcomes related to consumers and brands” |
The above word “experience” has seen an evolution in terms of its description where now this is further expanded across the