Organisational Culture Perspective and Implementing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in Hotel Industry: Case of a Chain Hotel in the UK

Abstract

Goal and objectives of the dissertationGoalOrganisational culture is identified by most of researchers as one of the most important factors that enables or disables the achievement of desirable Customer Relationship Management (CRM) outcomes (Curry and Kkolou, 2004; Iriana and Buttle, 2006; Kale, 2004; Siriprasoetsin et al., 2011). Though the impact of organisational culture on CRM implementation has been the centre of attention for different researchers no study has been investigated this impact in the context of hotel industry from an empirical point of view. Hence the position taken in this research was based on the need of enhancing the knowledge of CRM implementation in the hotel industry from an organisational culture perspective. The research is designed based on the three main aims. The first aim is empirically investigating the impact of organisational culture on CRM implementation. Considering the importance of organisational culture in CRM implementations, the research's second aim moved toward investigating the approach and strategies that could help hotel businesses to improve their organisational culture and consequently their CRM outcomes. As the third and final aim, the research investigated the potential overlap between guests' satisfaction criteria and intended satisfaction criteria by implementing CRM.Objectives1. To review the literature and identify the organisational culture factors with potential impact on CRM outcomes.2. To review the literature and identify an organisational culture model with the ability to measure these factors.3. To empirically investigate the impact of identified factors on CRM implementation.4. To rank the organisational cultural factors based on their importance for CRM outcomes.5. To find the best approach and strategies to improve the affective organisational culture factor.6. Based on the finding, to suggest managerial implications for overcoming cultural barriers in order to leverage the full potential of CRM projects.7. To find the potential overlaps between intended CRM outcomes and customer satisfaction criteria.8. Based on the finding, to suggest managerial implications about specific guest satisfaction criteria in budget hotels to excel in them towards outperforming competitors and retaining the interest of existing and potential customers.MethodologyThe research is conducted base on case study approach and a chain hotel from the UK was selected as the case of the research. The study is designed based on mixed methods via sequential triangulation technique (Creswell et al., 2003; Johnson, 2007). Accordingly, the research is designed base on three sequential phases; starting with phase one (first aim) with quantitative approach to empirically investigate the impact of organisational culture on the CRM implementation. Research's instrument for this phase is a questionnaire adapted from two standard questionnaires of Denison Organisational Culture Survey (DOCS) (Denison and Neale, 1996) and Mendoza CRM Model (Mendoza et al., 2006). The total population considered as managers of all branches and initially 346 questionnaires were distributed and 214 (58%) completed questionnaires were used for the statistical analysis. Collected data were subjected to correlation and multiple regression tests by using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) version 21.This is then followed by the second phase (second aim) through qualitative approach to find how important organisational culture factors from phase one can be improved. In this phase 12 interviews were conducted with mangers of four branches. Mangers were asked about approaches and strategies that could improve organisational culture. Deductive theory via template analyses (King et al., 2004) was used for analysing the interviews' transcripts.Phase three (third aim), with qualitative approach is investigated on the potential overlap between intended CRM outcomes of the case study and real guests' satisfaction criteria. …