IT-ENABLED CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MANAGEMENT: SYSTEMS AND STRATEGIES TO ENHANCE PERFORMANCE

Service companies today face new challenges arising from the widespread of technologies, which affects their relationships with customers. This is particularly true in the hospitality industry, where the emergence of Online Travel Agencies, such as Booking.com, today erodes the share of reservations directly done by guests through traditional channels. In the literature, in last decades several studies deepened effects of information technology on customer service systems, linking such benefits to concepts of service quality and value generated for and by customers. On this base, recent studies introduced the concept of customer experience management, a strategic process aimed to manage the entire experience perceived by guests while getting in touch with the company. Therefore, IT-enabled CEM strategies today represent a trend topic in both academia and industry, and personalization represents the core functionality offered by service companies to reach this goal. This dissertation contains three works. At first, a theoretical study offers a complete review of the studies which in several disciplines described elements and relationships among component of a customer service system. In this first article, 1030 articles have been reviewed, to finally coding and classifying 192 articles. The literature describes functionalities and the effect of technical and social attributes of customer service systems, and how each element translates into service quality provided and customer value perceived. The work therefore offers an interdisciplinary review, describing a paradigm of how all elements of an information system for customer management can generate value for both internal and external actors of the service chain. Based on this theoretical framework, and contextualizing it within the hospitality industry, two articles are then reported. The first one, entitled ―Information Systems for Customer Experience Management: effects of usage and users’ perceptions on satisfaction‖, shows how different patterns of usage, and different beliefs and attitudes of system users, translates into different benefits perceived by both customers and employees, and how top/medium management plays a critical role in advocating its usage. By conducting two surveys and collecting external data from Google Analytics and TripAdvisor online review platform, the work shows how an IT-enabled CEM strategy can sustain firms‘ competitiveness, levering on new technological innovations to generate value and loyalty among guests. The second article, entitled ―The Impact of IT-enabled Customer Experience Management on Service Perceptions and Performance‖ places the focus on individuals and firm level outcomes, making three contributions to the literature. First, it demonstrates a positive role played by signifiers in service system design. Second, it show how service personalization through CEM systems translates into enhanced service quality and comfort perceived by guests. Finally, it reports a firm-level service improvement in terms of revenue share-shift through disintermediation. iii Findings from the three chapters therefore describe what elements characterize a customer service system and how they can, from a theoretical and empirical standpoint, generate customer value and information system success through service personalization and system usage. This work can therefore contribute to both literature and industry offering a multi-disciplinary study of elements affecting the overall customer experience, and how firms can deal with today challenges by levering on IT.