酒店管理荷兰英语论文：how to up-sell in front office department in West

Abstract摘要

本研究旨在探讨威斯汀在服务体验过程中如何通过向上销售策略来提高消费者满意度，从而增加酒店收入，同时更好地满足消费者需求，提高客户忠诚度，从而在酒店之间建立长期互利共赢的关系。以及消费者。本研究采用定量研究的方法，通过问卷调查165名消费者，收集数据。

This study aimed at discussing how Westin was through its up-selling tactics in service encounter process to improve consumer satisfaction, thereby increasing hotel revenues, as well as better meeting consumer demand to improve customer loyalty at the same time to establish a long-term mutually beneficial and win-win relationship between the hotel and consumers. In this study, it made use of a quantitative research method, by investigating 165 consumers through questionnaire to collect data.
 

笔者结合相关文献和调查结果，得出结论：威斯汀前厅部员工可以使用CRM系统、良好的促销技巧和优质的服务，更好地满足消费者的个性化需求；为客户提供更具价值的产品和服务，有助于说服消费者，使其更具竞争力。给他们带来更好的消费体验。最后从客户关系管理、促销技巧、服务质量三个方面对威斯汀前厅部员工今后如何更好地实施促销策略进行了介绍。

The author combined with relevant literatures and survey results to draw a conclusion that Westin’s front office department staff could use CRM system, good promotional skills and high quality service to better meet the individual needs of consumers; providing customers with more valuable products and services could help to persuade consumers and bring them better consumption experience. The author finally was from three aspects: CRM, promotional skills, service quality to recommend on how Westin’s front office department staff implements up-selling tactics better in future.

Keywords: up-selling tactics; service encounter; customer relationship management (CRM); promotional skills; service quality

关键词：向上销售策略；服务遭遇；客户关系管理（CRM）；促销技巧；服务质量

 

1.0 Introduction介绍

1.1 Problem description 问题描述

21世纪以来，中国五星级酒店的数量从2000年的15家增加到了1000家（克里克和斯宾塞，2011年）。中国已成为世界上五星级酒店最多的国家之一（Bianchi，2006年）。然而，自2008年金融危机发生以来，中国五星级酒店的发展面临着巨大挑战（Albayrak和Caber，2015年）。一方面，2013年，中国政府颁布了一项禁止奢侈消费的政策，要求在高星级酒店禁止公务员消费，因此高星级酒店的业绩显著下降（Albayrak和Caber，2015年）。另一方面，近年来，中国大陆对豪华酒店的投资呈现出过度的趋势，中国有2800多家五星级酒店，这些酒店大多聚集在北京、上海、广州等一线城市，但入住率低，使得豪华酒店的收入和支出出现了不正常的情况，使得豪华酒店的收入和支出出现了失衡。供应过剩的阴影覆盖了中国大陆的酒店业（Siponen、Mahmood和Pahnila，2014年）。据《2014年中国酒店业发展报告》统计，2014年，中国酒店业餐饮销售额下降30.31%，客房销售额下降23.25%，不少五星级酒店在客人流失后开始考虑拓展新市场。

Since the 21st century, the number of China's five-star hotels has been increased from 15 in 2000 to 1000 (Crick and Spencer, 2011). China has become one of the countries with the most five-star hotels in the world (Bianchi, 2006). However, since the financial crisis happened in 2008, the development of China's five-star hotels faces enormous challenges (Albayrak and Caber, 2015). On the one hand, in 2013, the Chinese government has issued a policy to ban luxury consumption, which required that civil servants will be banned to consuming in high star hotels, thus the performance of high star hotels dropped significantly (Albayrak and Caber, 2015). On the other hand, in recent years, investment in luxury hotels in mainland China shows an excessive trend, there are more than 2800 five-star hotels in China, most of these hotels have gathered in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and other first-tier cities, but low occupancy makes that the earnings and spending of luxury hotels are out of whack, the shadow of oversupply covers the hotel industry in Chinese mainland (Siponen, Mahmood and Pahnila, 2014). According to the statistics from the " Development Report of the Hotel Industry in China in 2014", in 2014, the catering sales of China's hotel industry fell 30.31%, the room sales decreased 23.25%, and many 5-star hotels began to think about extension of new market after the loss of guests. 

Westin Beijing Financial Street (Westin for short) was opened in 2006, it is adjacent to the West Second Ring Road, the Xidan shopping center, the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square. Beijing's business, tourism, sightseeing and entertainment centers are close to the hotel. The hotel has become one of the most famous luxury hotels in Beijing, it also gains considerable economic profits (Turner and Guilding, 2014). However, as the macro environment changes, such as: the slow development of the Chinese economy, the policy of banning luxury consumption issued by the government and the excessive competition in luxury hotel industry in China, etc., (Siponen, Mahmood and Pahnila, 2014), the management of Westin also feel that they are likely to face more and more challenges and risks in business management in future, it is necessary for them to take some targeted measures to deal with that, of which a up-selling tactics in front office department is one of the new reform measures that the management plans to promote. The purpose of this study will be discussing how Westin is through improving its up-selling tactics in service encounter process to improve consumer satisfaction, thereby increasing hotel revenues, as well as better meeting consumer demand to improve customer loyalty at the same time to establish a long-term mutually beneficial and win-win relationship between the hotel and consumers. 

Service encounter between service providers and customers has become an important part of service management (Heidig, 2012).The better a hotel behaves in service encounter process, the higher degree of consumer satisfaction it will acquire, and it will be more likely to bring benefits for the hotel  (Heidig, 2012). Up-selling tactics help a hotel to reduce marketing costs to improve customer satisfaction and sales (Wirtz et al., 2003). To apply up-selling tactics to service encounter process will help Westin to cope with the current difficulties. According to the above analysis, the problem statement will be determined as follows: to discuss the impact of the up-selling tactics used in front office department of Westin Beijing Financial Street on consumer satisfaction and consumer perception in service encounter process. For hotel front desk staff, up-selling tactics mainly include customer relationship management (CRM) tactic, promotional skill tactic and service quality tactic. According to the problem statement and the theory of service encounter, some research questions about Westin’s up-selling tactics were determined as follows.

-To discuss how Westin’s front desk staff collect and make use of customer information in carrying out up-selling tactics;

-To explore how Westin’s front desk staff achieve up-selling tactics through communication with customers; 

-To find the impact of service quality of Westin’s front desk staff on the success of up-selling tactics;

-To recommend on how Westin’s front desk staff make use of the above three tactics to achieve successful up-selling.

1.2 Literature Review

In the following content, it is first of all from four aspects: personalized service, customer value, persuasion, customer experience to review literatures relating to service encounter. Then, it is from customer relationship management (CRM), promotional skills, service level to review literatures relating to up-selling tactics. Finally, the author carried out a critical analysis on the literatures to understand the limitations of the current researches on up-selling tactics, pointing out the theoretical innovation of this study.

...............................

5.3 Implications

It can be found through the analysis of this study that Westin can take advantages of CRM, promotional skills and high-quality services, these up-selling tactics to meet the individual needs of consumers to provide consumers with more value, so as to persuade consumers and enhance their consumption experience, and ultimately improving the hotel sales to achieve the purpose of improving customer loyalty. Thus in the future, it is necessary for Westin to increase and improve its management in terms of CRM, promotional skills and quality of service. Based on this, the author brings forward the following recommendations in three areas.

Firstly, considering CRM, the author believes that first of all, the smooth implementation of up-selling tactics in future requires Westin to choose a CRM system which fit it well. It makes information in terms of marketing, customer service and other business aspects of this hotel can be fully, promptly and orderly disseminated between the hotel and its customers to achieve efficient use of customer resources. Second of all, it should make employees know the importance of customer information collection, the hotel can link the staff’s work of collecting guest information with their incentives, staff who gathers information actively will be awarded and they will be looked on as a positive image to encourage other employees to pay attention to collecting guest information, while the hotel management should let employees of different departments share their collected information and strengthen the cooperation with the front office department staff and other departments, which will help the staff to better understand guests to successfully achieve up-selling tactics. Finally, the hotel should strengthen staff training to improve the staff’s capacity, technology and knowledge in the use of the CRM system to ensure that the effectiveness of the CRM system can be made use to the largest extent.

Secondly, front office department staff has a directly contact with guests, thus during provision of reception services, they are also responsible for up-selling. Promotional skills of front office department staff affect guests’ understanding, assessment towards the hotel, as well as whether they will come again, and ultimately affecting a hotel's business results. Thus in future, Westin should focus on staff training for front office department staff to improve their promotional skills. The training includes cultivating a good professional quality; memorizing the names of guests as soon as possible; provision of services with sincere attitude, accurate language; being familiar with the hotel's service measures and service items’ memorizing the hotel room price, size, facilities and decoration standards to promote to guests; being good at observation; analysis of psychology, characteristics and needs of guests of different types, and so on.

Finally, the decline in the service quality of a hotel is usually due to reduced employee satisfaction. To make customers satisfied, a hotel should first of all satisfy the employee and even make the them be moved, thus they will consciously care about hotel business; to make staff share woe and honor with the hotel and make them feel that they are closely related to the benefits of the hotel will allow them to be full of enthusiasm in serving customers and they will effectively give top priority to what customer need. Thus in future, in terms of human resources management, Westin should take a series of measures to strengthen the care for the employees, the measures include a special gift for each employee’s birthday; improving employee empowerment, implementation of a more humanized humane human resource management mode, and so on.

 

References

Albayrak, T. and Caber, M. (2015). Prioritisation of the hotel attributes according to their influence on satisfaction: a comparison of two techniques. Tourism Management, 46(2), 43-50.

Best, J.W. (1997). Research in education. 3rd ed. Englewood Cliff, NJ: Prentice Hall, Inc.

Bianchi, L. (2006). Hotel of future: what’s ahead. Crain’s. Chicago Business, 29(39), 205-211.

Biyalogorsky, E., Gerstner, E., Weiss, D., & Xie, J. (2005). The economics of service upgrades. Journal of Service Research, 7(3), 234-244.

Bolton, R.N., Lemon, K.N., & Verhoef, P.C. (2008). Expanding business-to-business customer relationships: modeling the customer upgrade decision. Journal of Marketing, 72(1), 46-64.

Borgianni, Y., Cascini, G. & Rotini, F. (2015). Business process reengineering driven by customer value: a support for undertaking decisions under uncertainty conditions. Computers in Industry, 68(4), 132-147.

Carlson, J., O’Cass, A. & Ahrholdt, D. (2015). Assessing customers’ perceived value of the online channel of multichannel retailers: A two country examination. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 27(11), 90-102.

Chen, S. C. & Lin, C. P. (2015). The impact of customer experience and perceived value on sustainable social relationship in blogs: An empirical study. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 96(7), 40-50.

Cohen, M. D. (2004). Exploiting response models-optimizing cross-sell and up-sell opportunities in banking. Information Systems, 29(4), 327-341.

Crick, A. P. and Spencer, A. (2011). Hospitality quality: new directions and new challenges. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 23(4), 155-163.

Gale, B.T. (1994). Managing customer value: creating quality and service that customers can see. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.

Goldstein, M. (1997). Words to the wise. Travel Agent, 289, 78-83.  

Gross, M.J. and Huang, S. S. (2013). The domestic development experience of a hotel firm with Chinese characteristics: the case of Jin Jiang. Cornell Hospitality Quarterly, 5(54), 211 - 224.

Heidig, W. (2012). Upselling or Upsetting? Studies on the behavioral consequences of upsell offers in service encounters. Retrieved August 30, 2015, from Web site: http://verdi.unisg.ch/www/edis.nsf/SysLkpByIdentifier/4086/$FILE/dis4086.pdf

Hyun, S. S. and Kang, J. (2014). A better investment in luxury restaurants: Environmental or non-environmental cues? International Journal of Hospitality Management, 39(5), 57-70.

Jayaraman, V. and Luo, Y. (2007). Creating competitive advantages through new value creation: a reverse logistics perspective. AMP, 5(21), 56 - 73.

Kamakura, W.A. (2008). Cross-selling: offering the right product to the right customer at the right time. Journal of Relationship Marketing, 6(3), 41-58. 

Kimes, S. E. (2008). The role of technology in restaurant revenue management. Cornell Hospitality Quarterly, 8(49), 297 - 309.

Lynn, M. & McCall, M. (2009). Techniques for increasing servers' tips: how generalizable are they? Cornell Hospitality Quarterly, 5(50), 198 - 208.

Martin, B. (2003). Providing quality service: what every hospitality service provider needs to know. New Jersey: Prentice Hall.

McComb, T. (1999). The implementation of the suggestive selling training program for the employees of the XYZ Resort and CASINO. 

Meiseberg, B. (2013).Social capital and start-up performance: the role of customer capital. AMPROC, 1, 12519.

Michels, N. & Bowen, D. (2005). The relevance of retail loyalty strategy and practice for leisure/tourism. Journal of Vacation Marketing, 1(11), 5 - 19.

Mohsin, A., Lengler, J. and Kumar, B. (2013). Exploring the antecedents of intentions to leave the job: The case of luxury hotel staff.  International Journal of Hospitality Management, 35(12), 48-58.

Moon, R. D. (1994). Deployment of computer networks in leisure-packaged tour marketing in the United States. Journal of Vacation Marketing, 1(1), 41 - 60.

Moorthy, J., Lahiri, R., Biswas, N., Sanyal, D., Ranjan, F., Nanath, K. & Ghosh, P. (2015). Big Data: Prospects and Challenges. Vikalpa, 3(40), 74 – 96.

Oh, H. and Hsu, C. H. C. (2014). Assessing equivalence of hotel brand equity measures in cross-cultural contexts. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 36(1),156-166.

Porter, M. E. (1985). Competitive advantage. New York, NY: Free Press.

Salazar, M.T., Harrison, T., & Ansell, J. (2007). An approach for the identification of cross-sell and up-sell opportunities using a financial services customer database. Journal of Financial Services Marketing, 12(2), 115-131.

SAS. (2008). How can we drive organic growth through cross-sell and up-sell opportunities? Retrieved August 30, 2015.

Saunders, M., Lewis, P. and Thornhill, A. (2007). Research methods for business students (4th, ed.).Essex, Pearson Education Limited.

Sigala, M. (2013). A framework for designing and implementing effective online coupons in tourism and hospitality. Journal of Vacation Marketing, 4(19), 165 - 180.

Siponen, M., Mahmood, A. and Pahnila, S. (2014). Employees’ adherence to information security policies: an exploratory field study. Information & Management, 51(2), 217-224.

Strong View Systems. (2013). The ultimate lifecycle email marketing guide: cross & up-sell programs.

Tan, F. T & Netessine, S. (2014). The implications of worker behavior for staffing decisions: empirical evidence and best practices. Cornell Hospitality Quarterly, 8(55), 277 - 286.

Turner, M. J. and Guilding, C. (2014). An investigation of Australian and New Zealand hotel ownership. Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Management, 21(12), 76-89.

Wang, Y. & Fesenmaier, D. R. (2006). Identifying the success factors of web-based marketing strategy: an investigation of convention and visitors bureaus in the United States. Journal of Travel Research, 2(44), 239 - 249.

Wirtz, J., Kimes, S.E., Ho, J., & Patterson, P.G. (2003). Revenue management: resolving potential customer conflicts. Journal of Revenue and Pricing Management, 2(3), 216-226.