Customer Service Experience in Hotel Operations: An Empirical Analysis

Marketers want to offer pleasurable experiences to the customers across channels, not only better services. Customer experience incorporates company-customer interaction that includes both functional and emotional clues developed through different touch points. This research brings an understanding of customer experience quality in hotel operations. This study adopted customer experience scale and examined its effect on customer satisfaction, brand loyalty and word-of-mouth in hotel industry. Present study has been conducted with the hotel guests in order to capture the real essence of customer experience construct. Results showed significant influence of customer experience dimensions on customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction influences both brand loyalty and word-of-mouth, and the indirect effect of customer satisfaction on word-of-mouth through brand loyalty is much strong. On the whole, this study extends the applicability of customer experience quality scale in hotel operations, which makes marketers to think about the different touch points during customer interaction with the hotel brand. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.