The Impact of IT-Enabled Customer Experience Management on Service Perceptions and Performance

Abstract

While information systems have been a catalyst for strategy in the hospitality industry for almost three decades, Customer Experience Management (CEM) has received substantial research attention as of late. CEM calls for the transformation of customer interactions, enabling an unprecedented scale and scope of service personalization. Such a transformation is theorized to benefit hospitality firms through increased service perceptions and loyalty. The work empirically addresses these questions by evaluating an IT-enabled CEM strategy in seven hotels. The work provides three contributions: first, it shows that IT-enabled CEM significantly increases customer preference elicitation during the service personalization process. Second, it demonstrates that tailored customer experiences translate into higher customer service evaluations and comfort perceptions of the hotels. Third, it shows that IT-enabled CEM improves disintermediation from high-cost distribution channels to low-cost direct channels.