Overview of Customer Relationship Management for Hotels

organizations, and has a major impact and influence on successful change initiatives (Schein, 1988; McAdams, 1996).

The thesis approaches CM theory because when implementing a CRM project, it affects all activities, functional departments of the business and the business needs to change to match and achieve the project's goals. Armenakis and Harris (2002), CRM implementation is carried out based on 3 stages of change: preparing for change, implementing change and maintaining change. In addition, Chen and Popovich (2003); Kim et al. (2004); Mendoza et al. (2007) view CRM as the way an organization manages its relationship with customers and relies on CM theory to successfully implement CRM. The CRM process requires changing business processes in a customer-centric strategic direction. With Mendoza et al. (2007) all business processes involve both direct and indirect customer interaction management activities. Furthermore, CM affects organizational members at all levels from top management to employees (Gilley and McMillan, 2009). Therefore, the CM model developed by construction researchers often focuses on the human factor in the three stages of the change process.

When studying CRM components based on CM theory, researchers have paid special attention to changes in each stage of the change process, typically the change implementation stage. Therefore, the human resource and process factors (Chen and Popovich, 2003; Kim et al., 2004; Mendoza et al., 2007; Mohammad Almotairi, 2008) have received the most attention. Studies on planning for change readiness or how to implement and manage, maintain organizational change are still very limited.

In summary, through the study of CRM-related theories, each theory has identified the components of CRM and the contribution of each component is different depending on the level of CRM implementation. With the RBV theory, CRM components include: human resources and technology to ensure the connection between businesses, customers and partners. With the RM theory, researchers often focus on the technology component to manage customers and with the CM theory, human resources and processes are given more attention.

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Within the scope of the research, the thesis will conduct an integrated study of the three theories RBV, RM and CM to determine the main components of CRM including: human resources, technology and processes. On that basis, the thesis will determine the factors affecting the successful implementation of CRM and the CRM process in relation to the main components of CRM.

1.2.2. Overview of customer relationship management of hotels

1.2.2.1. Hotel customer relationship management

 Concept of customer relationship management

To date, researchers and managers have pointed out CRM perspectives from many different approaches. Through the research review process, researchers Zablah, Bellenger and Johnston (2004), Rabah et al. (2011) have focused on three main perspectives: technology, process and business strategy.

CRM is a business strategy : This is the most comprehensive perspective. CRM is considered the task of the entire organization, requiring the connection and coordination between departments. CRM is a business strategy based on obtaining and maintaining profitable customers, improving relationships between businesses and customers. This relationship must be maintained and cooperated for a long time to create a difference in value for both businesses and customers, thereby optimizing profits, revenue, and customer loyalty.

CRM is a process : From this perspective, CRM is seen as a business capability, focusing on customer transactions through the sales process. The business CRM system mainly focuses on interaction management departments, managing customer databases based on intelligent data mining. Therefore, CRM is only used for the purpose of supporting work performance.

CRM is a technology solution : CRM is the process of applying IT to integrate sales systems, marketing systems and information systems to establish relationships with customers. This is a relatively common view among businesses and technology solution providers. Therefore, CRM is considered software that uses technology capabilities to support customer relationship management. With this view, CRM only focuses on the technology factor.

Thus, the concept of CRM is discussed with many different views and perspectives. However, the nature of CRM is customer orientation, directing all business activities to focus on customers. Therefore, the concept of CRM is a customer-oriented business strategy that is considered the most comprehensive and complete. With the scope of the thesis research, the definition of CRM is based on the integration of RBV, RM and CM theories, including the main components of CRM and focusing on its purpose. Therefore, in this thesis, CRM is understood as follows: " CRM is a management process that integrates processes, people and technology to understand the business's customers, enhance the value of stakeholders, bring profits to the business and maximize customer loyalty ".

Based on the definition of CRM, identifying the factors that influence successful CRM implementation will have to fall within the scope of managing, integrating and controlling the key components of CRM.

 Concept of hotel customer relationship management

CRM has become an important strategy to personalize the customer experience, improve customer satisfaction and retention, especially in hotels. In the hotel business, customer interaction is especially important. To be successful in this business, it is necessary to ensure that customers are satisfied with the hotel's services.

Through the research overview, researchers have put forward many perspectives on CRM in hotels. Four important aspects of CRM in hotels that need to be considered are: (1) customers should be managed as an important asset; (2) not all customers have the same desires; (3) customers differ in their needs.

their needs, preferences, and purchasing behavior; and (4) with a better understanding of their customers, hotels can tailor their services to maximize overall value.

According to Bohling et al. (2009), the ability of each hotel to build positive relationships with customers will lead to long-term success and therefore CRM is a key issue in both theory and practice of marketing activities in the hotel business (KDKS). When studying CRM in the hotel context, the authors all agree that CRM also has all the common characteristics including:

- CRM is an art, expressed in both perception and action: The starting point of CRM is the awareness of the need to carry out the process of establishing, maintaining and developing customer relationships. All levels of management and all members of the hotel need to have a correct awareness of CRM. For all members of the hotel to have the correct awareness, managers need to grasp the psychology of the staff, and convey the importance of customers to the hotel in an artistic way on the basis of considering customers as the only source of profit for the hotel and customers themselves ensuring the existence and development of the hotel. In addition, CRM demonstrates its art through all activities of relating to external customers, through customer care before, during and after sales.

- CRM is scientific, expressed in the process of organizing, planning to collect customer information, establishing strategies to build, maintain and develop customer relationships of the hotel. The scientific thinking about the CRM system is that any business needs to focus on developing core competencies, general strategies, processes and technology in implementing the construction and development of long-term relationships with customers.

- Customer relationship management is technological, reflected in the hotel's customer information management software. The hotel's CRM system, when built, is closely linked to IT, including both hardware and software. CRM software technology plays an increasingly important role in the CRM system due to its ability to support the implementation of functional CRM activities such as automating marketing, sales and service processes.

- In addition to the general characteristics of CRM, in hotels, CRM is also competitive. The hotel business is a business field in a highly competitive environment and the level of customer turnover is increasingly high (Rababah, 2012; Al-Momani and Noor, 2009). Moreover, the cost of attracting customers and the level of customer expectations are also increasing, making the competitiveness of hotels significantly dependent on the ability to meet customer needs effectively (Budiono Hardjono and Lai Pooi San, 2017). Therefore, CRM is considered the best strategy for hotels to differentiate themselves from competitors. CRM includes a series of activities that provide hotels with the opportunity to gain or maintain a competitive advantage over their competitors (Elizabeth Wellington, 2017; Mohmmed and Rashed, 2012; Ammari and Nusair, 2014).

Thus, based on the concept of CRM identified above, combined with the characteristics of CRM in hotels, within the scope of the thesis, hotel CRM can be understood as follows: " CRM is a management process that integrates processes, people and technology to understand hotel customers, bring profits to the hotel and achieve customer loyalty".

Benefits of customer relationship management in hotels

For hotels, CRM implementation is an opportunity to increase customer value, improve customer satisfaction, and achieve business efficiency (Daghfous and Barkhi, 2009). Therefore, enhancing the benefits of CRM has become a key factor for the success of the hotel industry. Some of the benefits of successful CRM implementation identified by researchers include:

- Cost savings: Implementing CRM in hotels helps reduce sales costs and customer search costs. According to Chen and Popovich (2003), CRM applications allow the exploitation of customer information at a lower cost than conventional methods. A CRM system allows the collection, storage, maintenance and distribution of necessary customer information. CRM helps improve the efficiency of interactions between customers and hotels, helps improve the efficiency of marketing activities, reduce costs for marketing activities, sending mail, customer communication, customer care, customer service... Thanks to CRM, hotels can save on customer search costs, customer care and market research costs...

- Customer classification: According to Bull, C (2003), CRM helps hotels choose target markets more accurately. Through CRM, hotels can evaluate the profitability of each customer, thereby classifying, evaluating and selecting customer groups most effectively. Also according to (Lo, Stalcup and Lee, 2008), CRM helps hotels understand customer requirements and expectations; provide services that create value for customers and manage customer lifecycles effectively.

- Increase customer benefits: According to Lo and Lee (2008), CRM helps increase the interaction between businesses and customers, customers can search for more information about products, thereby customers can exploit more product features, customers can receive additional value-added services from the hotel... In many cases, thanks to the CRM system, customers can receive many more benefits from products and hotels.

- Customer retention and customer loyalty: According to Wu and Li (2011); Ken Jacobson (2015), CRM helps improve the economic efficiency of business operations by increasing the lifetime value of customers. A successful CRM strategy will encourage customers to buy more products, customers will be more loyal to the business and improve the efficiency of transactions with the hotel.

- Tools to support employees to perform their work effectively: According to Peppard, J. (2000), CRM provides a deep understanding of customers, thereby supporting employees

Hotels accurately assess customer expectations so that they can use it to change products, improve services, have a complete view of the customer and allow for the assessment of customer lifetime value.

Thus, the benefits of CRM will be directed towards creating value for customers, satisfying customers, maintaining and creating loyal customers.

1.2.2.2. The relationship between customer relationship management and customer loyalty

According to Majumdar (2005) stated that “ Customer loyalty is a complex and multidimensional concept .” The complexity has made customer loyalty difficult to define in a suitable form that can be agreed upon by everyone. The most widely accepted definition is that loyalty is described as a biased, behavioral response (i.e. purchase) that manifests over time. Customer loyalty is defined as a stable relationship between an individual’s attitude and repurchase, representing the rate, consistency, and likelihood of repurchase with the same supplier Dick and Basu (1994).

According to Oliver (1999), loyalty is defined as “ a deep commitment to repurchase or re-patronize a particular product or service in the future, thus causing repetition of the same brand or the same brand purchase, despite situational influences and marketing efforts that are likely to cause switching behavior ”. Agreeing with this view, Chaudhuri (1999) also affirmed that loyalty is a customer's commitment to repurchase a preferred product or service, and to prioritize purchasing products of a certain brand in the future.

Also according to Oliver (1999), loyalty is developed through the following four forms:

- Cognitive loyalty: The customer believes the product is superior to other products and therefore chooses to buy it. Information about the brand and the perceived quality of the product influence the purchase decision.

- Affective loyalty: When a favorable attitude towards a brand develops, it will influence the formation of loyalty.

- Willpower loyalty: Greater involvement and motivation by strong purchase intentions will form and develop loyalty.

- Action loyalty: Strong motivation leads to direct action, ignoring any incidents that hinder loyalty in the decision to purchase a particular brand.

Research on customer loyalty has many different approaches: behavioral approach according to Seiders et al. (2005) and attitude and perspective of Jacoby and Chesnut (1978).

Behavioral loyalty is often expressed in a behavioral approach based on future repurchase behavior, number and frequency of repurchases, and brand switching per purchase (Bandyopadhyay and Martel, 2007; Liang et al. 2009). Baloglu (2002), behavioral loyalty is measured by repeat visits, word of mouth, and voluntary partnerships, while brand loyalty

Attitudinal loyalty includes emotional attachment, trust, and commitment. Shirin and Puth (2011) asserted that customer satisfaction, perceived value, and brand trust are closely related to the concept of attitudinal loyalty.

Attitudinal loyalty is an attitudinal approach, which emphasizes the role of experience and emotional aspects in loyalty and reflects customer actions; it is related to the customer's past purchase limit with a particular brand or a group of brands and the likelihood of future purchase based on past purchase behavior Evanschitzky et al. (2006).

To study customer loyalty, there are three main approaches, namely: behavioral approach, attitudinal approach, and composite approach (Oh, 1995). The authors have demonstrated that the composite approach involving both attitudes and behaviors is the most powerful and appropriate approach for research because it captures the two most influential factors of consumer decision making (Rujrutana and Yaowalak, 2011).

In a business context, loyalty is described as a customer’s commitment to a particular organization, by making repeated purchases and recommending the product or service to others. The goal of a business is to have a long-term, beneficial relationship between the customer and the business. A beneficial customer relationship will help businesses gain customer loyalty.

Hotel businesses are always faced with the growth in quantity and fierce competition. Therefore, hotels have strengthened customer loyalty and turned it into the hotel's ability to differentiate itself from competitors. In the hotel industry, researchers have measured loyalty by exclusive behavior through repeat visits and word of mouth to determine the effectiveness of various stimuli (Choi and Chu, 2001; Matzler et al., 2006). Repeat visits and loyalty can be called interchangeably. However, it is only a surface-level reference rather than a concept (Shirin and Puth, 2011).

Customers are not only satisfied with a product or service but will continue to use it. Loyal customers feel emotionally attached to a business. This emotional bond makes customers loyal, thus encouraging them to continue purchasing the business’s products or services and spread the word. To increase loyalty, businesses must increase the satisfaction level of each customer and also maintain the satisfaction level over a long period of time. Therefore, CRM appears as an activity undertaken by businesses to attract and retain customers, building customer loyalty. In the context of CRM implementation, all the factors that influence loyalty can be interrelated to the CRM dimensions.

According to the research conducted by Nicolaoua and Somnath Bhattacharya (2006), CRM implementation in a business is done to reduce costs.

and increase the efficiency of business operations will lead to beneficial results for the business and for customers, while increasing the number of customers, satisfaction and loyalty. Successful CRM will provide data to the business departments, after processing the data, the business will have useful information from which to provide products and services suitable for customers in the long term. This information can help employees in different departments of the business interact effectively with customers, provide better products and services to customers, thereby increasing satisfaction and loyalty. CRM systems help businesses develop strategies to create competitive advantages over competitors in the market. The results show that applying CRM is very important to increase customer loyalty.

Thus, CRM is the most effective approach in maintaining and establishing relationships with customers. Businesses need to understand that implementing CRM systems in their businesses is an important tool to develop customer retention strategies and create loyal customers. Therefore, CRM has become an essential strategic tool for businesses in a dynamic market where customer needs are constantly changing and the key to success lies in focusing on customer retention.

1.2.2.3. Hotel business

 Hotel concept

Along with the changes in the hotel business, the changes in scale, service quality, and facilities over time also lead to different views on hotels. In each country, the concept of hotel is also understood and defined differently based on the conditions and level of development of the hotel business in that country.

In Vietnam, according to the National Standard TCVN 4391:2015 on hotels, it is stipulated that: " A hotel is a tourist accommodation establishment built in blocks, ensuring the quality of facilities, equipment and necessary services to serve guests ". TCDL assesses and recognizes 4-star and 5-star hotels; provincial tourism agencies assess and recognize 1-star, 2-star and 3-star hotels.

According to the Law on Tourism (2017), the types of hotels, including hotels and tourist accommodation establishments (ATA), are places that provide services to meet the accommodation needs of tourists. The Government's Decree on ATA also states: ATA is a business establishment that provides rooms, beds and other services that meet the standards to serve tourists. Clause 1, Article 21, Section 3 of Decree No. 168/2017/ND-CP of the Government detailing a number of articles of the Law on Tourism stipulates: " Hotels are ATA that ensure the quality of facilities, equipment and necessary services to serve tourists ".

Thus, the concept of hotel is mentioned in many domestic and foreign documents in the research, however, within the scope of the thesis, the researcher chooses to approach the regulations on hotels according to the Vietnam Tourism Law (2017): "Hotel is a tourist accommodation facility that ensures the quality of facilities, equipment and necessary services to serve tourists ".

 Hotel business concept

Nowadays, the concept of “hotel business” besides the two main types of business: room rental service and food service, also includes the business of additional services for tourists such as sports, medical, health care, conferences, etc. However, hotel business, regardless of the service, must be carried out under certain conditions, facilities, and service levels, with the goal of bringing profit to the hotel.

Thus, the definition of hotel business can be understood as follows: " Hotel business is a business activity based on providing accommodation, food and beverage services and additional services under certain conditions of facilities and service levels to meet the needs of tourists for the purpose of making a profit ".

 Characteristics of hotel business

- Customer characteristics: According to Nguyen Van Manh (2013), " Customers in the hotel business are consumers of tourism accommodation products, not limited by purpose, time, and space of consumption, in which tourists are only a market segment, but this is the main market segment, accounting for the largest proportion and playing the most important role in determining the existence and development of tourism accommodation businesses ".

Customers in the hotel business are all those who have a need to consume the products of the hotels. They can be: tourists, visitors or local people consuming individual products of the hotels. Some common criteria used to classify customers in the hotel business are:

Based on the nature of consumption and origin of customers: including local customers and non-local customers;

Based on the purpose of the guest's trip: business guests, visitors, ...

Based on the form of customer consumption organization: Customers consume hotel products through intermediary organizations, customers organize consumption themselves.

- Product characteristics: According to Nguyen Van Manh (2013): " Hotel products are understood as all services and goods that businesses provide to the market to meet customers' needs for accommodation, food and other additional needs to make a profit ".

The products of hotels are relatively diverse and rich, originating from the characteristics of the demand which is highly comprehensive and synchronized. Almost all products in hotels are implemented in the form of services when sold to customers. In terms of business fields, the products in hotel business include:

Accommodation service products (SPDV): include short-term and long-term room rental activities. Services are provided directly to guests mainly through the hotel's technical facilities and staff service activities.

Food and beverage services: include activities of producing dishes to serve guests (material production function); selling products produced by the hotel and other

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