CRM PRACTICES USED IN PAKISTAN TOURISM

INDUSTRY
Research proposal

Submitted By

Mishal Zikria
Mahnoor Amjad

Subject: Business Research Methods

Submitted to: Dr Lubna Maroof

DEPARTMENT OF MANAGEMENT SCIENCE

BAHRIA UNIVERSITY, ISLAMABAD
FALL 2022
Introduction ........................................................................................ 3
1.1. Problem identification ........................................................ 4
1.2. Research objective.............................................................. 4
1.3. Research question?............................................................. 5
Literature review .................................................................................. 6
2.1. Customer relationship management ................................... 6
2.2. CRM and tourism .............................................................. 6
2.3. Customer revisit and tourism ............................................. 7
Conceptual Framework........................................................................ 9
3.1. Hypothesis ........................................................................ 10
Methodology .................................................................................... 12
4.1. Research approach ........................................................... 12
4.2. Data collection .................................................................. 12
4.3. Data analysis .................................................................... 12
References ............................................................................... 14
Appendix ................................................................................. 16
 Introduction
The tourism industry is critical to the growth of any economy. Pakistan is blessed
with a broad range of cultures, landscapes, and meteorological conditions.
Pakistan's natural resources include beautiful mountains, glaciers, lakes, grazing
pastures, and national parks. The beauty of Taxila, Harappa, and Mohenjo Daro, as
well as Himalayan hill stations, can be found here. This country has multiple
mountain peaks exceeding 7000 meters, which attract visitors and adventurers
alike, particularly Karakorum 2. (Second highest Mountain in the world). Several
antique structures and old strongholds can be found in the country's northern
region. The valleys of Chitral and Hunza are enticing to travelers Before the global
economic crisis, Pakistan was visited annually by over 500,000 people.

CRM is a tool that companies use to partner with, acquire, and keep a specific
customer base. Implementing these concepts will increase value for the
organization as well as the customer (Parvathy & Sheth, 2001). It appears that this
CRM is a management tactic. Management of client contacts is its primary
objective. Businesses need to be able to locate, entice, and keep profitable
customers to do this (Hobby, 1999). The promotion role has always been the focus
of tourism marketing. However, marketing companies have turned their attention
to CRM strategies in response to the expanding demands and recognition that the
tourism sector and its marketing require a more comprehensive approach to
destination management. In the tourism and travel sector, numerous CRM
strategies have been put into practice. Companies and organizations involved in
travel and tourism were among of the first developers and adopters of CRM.
Given the inherent benefits of recurring visits to a location, CRM has been a
significant area of study when it comes to travel. Relationships can be built by
enabling interactive interaction between customers and the business, completing
transactions, offering personalization/customization options, and offering
customers’ loyalty or retention programs. We will examine the CRM strategies used
by local hotels and marketers to enhance visitors' intentions to visit and return to a
location because destination tourism is a major industry.

1.1. Problem identification

So far, several articles have been written on CRM, with many definitions,
assessments, and applications presented. However, it appears that most of them are
geared for practitioners. Marketers and managers choose various strategies based
on their abilities and skills and implement them without regard for whether tourists
like them or not. They appear to be bothering or harassing tourists at times.
Tourists may find it inconvenient to obtain information and ask questions. Any
marketer or manager can benefit from a variety of CRM tactics. The current study
investigates what practices are commonly used and recognized by tourists.

1.2. Research objective

From the standpoint of destination tourism and hotel management, the preliminary
investigation with the marketer indicated some of the challenges and factors that
are crucial. However, it was determined to investigate these challenges
and factors from the customer's perspective. As a result, the following objectives
were prioritized to be investigate in this research.

a. Based on visitor feedback, determine what CRM practices are often used by
Pakistani marketers and hotel managers.
b. To ascertain the association between CRM procedures and the propensity to
return to the same area and hotel.

1.3. Research question?

2. What is relationship between CRM and tourism especially destination

tourism?
3. What CRM practices used in tourism sector of Pakistan?
4. How are these different CRM practices used to affect the decision of person
to revisit a place?
 Literature review

2.1. Customer relationship management

To gain a competitive edge and boost an organization's performance, customer

relationship management (CRM) is described as just a "strategic approach that
enables organizations to use internal capabilities (technology, people, as well as
processes) to handle relationships with customers for the duration of their lives"
(Mohammed & Rashid, 2012). However, when fully and effectively implemented,
CRM is a cross-functional, consumer, technology-integrated management of
business processes strategy that incorporates the entire organization and maximizes
relationships (Chen & Popovich, 2003). Because CRM is a consumer system that
makes it simple for businesses to identify between various clients. This is since, as
a result of globalization, the roles of customers have changed from simple
consumers to multifaceted partners, co-creators for value, and co-generators of
knowledge and capabilities (Wang & Yang, 2004). Market businesses that serve
customers must develop a variety of methods to please them because customers
play such a wide range of functions in these businesses. Because these interactions
eventually serve as a road map for expanding their organization and capturing a
greater market share, many businesses concentrate their marketing efforts on
creating different customer relationships, including such acquisition and retention
of customers (Luck & Lancaster, 2003), (Kandampully & Suhartanto, 2000).

2.2. CRM and tourism

Tourist academics have not yet done a full investigation of customer relationship
management. Instead, then concentrating on specific tourist businesses, a large
portion of tourism and travel research focuses on destinations.
Furthermore, most significant corporations that have adopted CRM do not typically
work with academic scholars in tourism and travel programs. Although there is a
"gap" in the literature on CRM in the tourist industry, numerous travel behaviorists
have added to our knowledge of travelers. Customers are at the center of many
firms, according to many marketers. They think that to fulfil all their business goals,
they must first please their customers. CRM systems were created in response to the
growing requirement to handle customers well. CRM is not confined to a single
business; it may be applied to any industry. The service sector is particularly
important among these several industries since it differs from the goods sector. It's
challenging to satisfy service clients because there's a high chance of service
interruptions. It's a big task to avoid those disruptions through service quality
(Azmian, Nasrinahr & Foroughi, 2012). According to the literature, CRM will be
suitable for the tourism due to higher acquisition costs, escalating customer needs,
price sensitivity, an unsteady market, and declining brand recognition (Mohammed
& Rashid, 2012). Therefor they use different CRM practices to enhance customer
knowledge. These are different CRM practices used in tourism industry

a. Customer care
b. Customer feedback
c. Enhancing knowledge
d. Customization
e. Hospitality

2.3. Customer revisit and tourism

To develop a base of devoted customers, many CRM techniques are applied. How
clients view those varied tactics may determine their effectiveness and
whether or not they make sense to them. Customer loyalty, revisit, and referrals,
according to Kaanapali and Suhartan (2000), are based on how happy they were
with CRM activities relating to food and drink, reception, and housekeeping. Value
for money was also identified as the most important attribute by Ramanathan and
Ramanathan (2011), because many tourists anticipate good service for a reasonable
price. Aside from price, customer service and family friendliness can influence
tourists' decision to stay in a hotel or return to a location (Ramanathan &
Ramanathan, 2011). The availability of tourism qualities has a significant impact on
the experiences that begin with preparation, travel, and visiting, and end with
departure from a tourist region. Periods of enjoying family time and creating memories
in a stress-free environment (for instance, "having great fun with family while generating
memories in a nice environment") and periods of time spent outside "having room and
freedom to enjoy and be part of nature") are two experiences that people have while
travelling (Bilstein, 2018). These fascinating experiences are inextricably linked to
the satisfaction of visitors' needs, particularly if they can be scheduled around
professional requirements (Nemeth & Dory, 2019) or needs for individual activity,
including the desire to visit and take part in cultural and traditional events. In
addition to referring to how much fun a trip was, satisfaction also compares guests'
initial perspectives and expectations. If their experience meets their expectations,
tourists will be pleased (Valerio et al., 2019). Visiting the same spot again will
provide that joy.
 Conceptual Framework
After analyzing different literature related to CRM, the following is the conceptual
framework.

Customer Care

Customer
feedback

Enhancing Customer
knowledge revisit

Customization

Hospitality
 3.1. Hypothesis

To deliver value that is centered on the client, the entire organizational structure
must be adaptable. To support CRM goals, the organization's organizational
structure may need to be changed (Yim et al., 2004). In other words, CRM programs
require an implementation team made up of personnel from sales, advertising,
manufacturing, customer service, and information technology to devote all their
time to the project (Chen & Popovich, 2003). Organization structure (Mohammed &
Rashid, 2012) must be combined with other elements to adopt firm-wide CRM. To
investigate this connection, a few hypotheses were first created.

H1: Hospitality practices of hotel positively affect customer revisit

Ramanathan & Ramanathan (2011) stressed that in addition to cost, customer
service like family friendliness have an impact on whether guests return to a hotel
or destination. This indicates that, even while the cost is important, the way a
business treats its guests influences whether or not a consumer would return.

H2: Customer care is positively related to revisit

Customer care is the "job of taking care of customers and guaranteeing their
satisfaction with one's business as well as its goods or services," according to
Hanks (1989). These results suggest that treating consumers kindly will encourage
repeat business. Consequently, the following theory was created.

H3: Customer feedback is positively related to revisit

In addition to meeting very particular client needs, customer orientation also
foresees future requirements changes and adapts its strategy accordingly. (2009)
(Dev, Zhou, Brown, & Agarwal). When customer focus is used, marketers and
hoteliers frequently solicit consumer feedback and modify their day-to-day
operations accordingly.
H4: Enhancing Knowledge is positively related to revisit

Knowledge management systems and CRM management of knowledge are closely

connected concepts. Building a stronger client information base is one of the key
goals of CRM efforts. CRM systems that are successful effectively convert
customer data into customer insight (Yim et al., 2004).

H5: Customization is positively related to revisit

 Methodology
Considering that the goal of the study is to evaluate what crm practices used in
Pakistan and how these crm practices will affect tourist attention to revisit a place,
so the dependent variable is customer revisit and independent variable are different
crm practices. To test that impact of variable the proposed a model in which it
directly check the impact of each variable on other customer revisit intention in
simple word it also check how each independent variable are going to affect the
dependent variable.

4.1. Research approach

Respectively quantitative and qualitative information must be considered because

they are founded on meanings; the difference being that the former is generated from
numbers, while the latter is expressed through words. Research philosophy is
regarded as positivism because the polled marketers' opinions using a five-point
Likert-type scale questionnaire and conducted numerous statistical analyses.

4.2. Data collection

A cross sectional research design using a questioner is used to investigate

prevailing crm practices in tourism sector of Pakistan the sample size for the
survey questionnaire will be 500. Target audience will be travel agencies, local
hotels, and tourist from across different destination tourism places in Pakistan

4.3. Data analysis

Modeling the link between such a dependent variable one and or even more
independent variables is possible with regression analysis. This method is
employed in data mining to forecast values given a certain dataset.
Therefore, a regression analysis for research to check relationship between them
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Appendix