Social media and technology enabled real-time service development and design in tourism and hospitality

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1 Social media and technology enabled real-time service development and design in tourism and hospitality Adoption of social media by tourists is a relatively new phenomenon. Recent advances, such as dynamic, location-based and real-time social media technologies possess profound implications for the tourism industry. On the one hand, these developments entail an increase in consumers empowerment. On the other, they enable companies to instantly engage with their customers at all stages of the travel journey (pre, during, post) and without geographical boundaries, which ultimately intensifies competition on a global scale. Harnessing social media tools opens up unique opportunities for the development, design and delivery of tourism services. The purpose of the PhD is to explore the impact and the potential implications of using social media for the development and design of tourism services. Corresponding Author: Nicolas Gregori (etoruism Lab, School of Tourism, Bournemouth University) Contact Details: Bournemouth University, Dorset House, Fern Barrow, Poole, Dorset, BH12 5BB, UK ngregori@bournemouth.ac.uk Supervisory Team: Prof. Dimitrios Buhalis, Dr. Miguel Moital, Dr. Soo Jun 1

2 1 Introduction and rationale: Tourism is a hypercompetitive market environment and tourism and hospitality service provider compete for customers on a global scale. Over recent years the industry is confronted with profound changes in communication and information technologies (Buhalis and Law, 2008). Increasing adoption of recent technological advances such as real-time enabled social media communication, location based technologies and mobile devices increase consumers empowerment. Thus to remain competitive, tourism and hospitality businesses are increasingly required to both proactively adapt to consumers wants and react to dynamic changes in customer demand with increased speed. Approached from the perspective of service development and design this study explores how social media enabled real-time consumer information and communication changes the current understanding of the development and (re-)design of services. Furthermore the study explores how embracing real-time enabled social media enables tourism and hospitality providers to increasing the speed and agility of the development and (re-) design service offerings, in order to cater dynamically changing needs of modern consumers. 2 Theoretical Background (400) Given the increase in customer expectations, the globalisation of services, incremental speed in technological innovations and rapidly changing customer needs, service providers in general, and tourism and hospitality firms in particular, find themselves in a progressively competitive market environment (Lovelock and Wirtz, 2007; Buhalis, 2006). Against this background, developing, designing and delivering high quality services that meet increasingly dynamic expectations of consumers has been identified as a success-promising response to the outlined challenges (Zeithaml and Bitner, 2006; Alam and Perry, 2002). During the past four decades scholars from different backgrounds have contributed to the growing body of new service development and design research. This usually focuses on production intensive, supplier oriented service sectors, such as banking, insurances, telecommunications and logistics (Johnson et al., 2000; Johne and Storey, 1998). Contributions from consumer dominated high-contact service sectors such as tourism, hospitality and retailing however, are rather scarce (Ottenbacher, 2007). There is common agreement in the literature that developing and designing new services is a complex and long lasting process. There is a rich body of research that investigates the determinants of success for new service development (see Johne and Storey, 1998). In this regard he service development process has been identified as one of the critical success factors (Johnson et al., 2000; de Brentani, 1991). While it has been proved that deploying formalised strategies to guide the development process increase the success rate significantly (de Brentani, 1995; de Bretani, 2001; Ottenbacher et al., 2006), it is also reported widely in the literature that these formal structures are often linear and static in nature (Vermeulen and Dankbaar, 2002). This in turn leads to slow competitive speed of the development process, decreased adaptation capabilities and increased cost (de Jong and Vermeulen, 2003). Incorporating customers at all stages in the development process was found to be pivotal for ensuring the customer need-fit of the service offering (Alam and Perry, 2002). Moreover, technological competence and creating technological advantages has been identified as a crucial ingredient for creating competitive advantage through service innovation (Bitner et al., 2000; Jonas et al., 2006) Identifying success factors of new service development however only reveals what should be done, not how it should be done. Holistic research in to the specific stages of the new service development process however is relatively sparse. Seminal contributions in the field, that dates back to the late 1970 s, have focussed on translating findings from goods- 2

3 manufacturing backgrounds into the service industry sector (Scheuning and Johnson, 1989; Shostack, 1984; Tax and Stuart, 1997). Even though these models provided a descriptive view of the development process, they fail to address the peculiarities of service industries. Subsequently developed, service specific models, identified and addressed a variety of service specific characteristics of the innovation process, such as the interdepartmental involvement, the organisational characteristics, the role of customers and the intangible nature of service offerings (Stevens and Dimitriadis, 2005; Baker and Hart, 1999; Johnson et al., 2000; Alam, 2006; Alam and Perry, 2002). However regarding the role of technology in the service development processes, to date an internal focus has been applied. This is internal systems such as management information systems, customer relationship management systems or process management systems have been accounted for in the literature (Bitner et al., 2000; Jonas et al., 2006). The external focus of technology (the social sphere, extranets, online platforms) is ignored widely. In particular real-time enabled social-media offers opportnities for the development of services, as it allows companies to retrieve background information about consumers, engage in instant conversation, retrieve real-time consumer feedback and link conversations and feedback to specific geo-locations. As this information is available in real-time and free from geographical constraints, social media acts as a catalyst of change for service development. Therefore the present study is set out to develop an understanding how social media enabled real-time technology enables the speed and adaptability of the service development process in tourism and hospitality. o 3 Proposed Methodology Given the lack of theoretical constructs on how to develop and design services in the hospitality industry as well as the lacking generalisability of service design and development models from other service industry sectors, the study adopts a rather exploratory and qualitative approach. This research approach has been applied successfully in a large number of previous studies that deal with service development and design in various service industry sectors (Scheuning and Johnson, 1989; Tax and Stuart, 1997). In order to explore the information available through real-time social media, in-depth interviews with social media monitoring experts will be conducted. This will provide a sound understanding of the challenges and opportunities of real-time service development from an information availability perspective. Subsequently, a case study approach will be adopted, in order to examine the challenges and opportunities of technology and social media enabled service development. The case studies will focus o tourism and hospitality companies that are currently engaged in using social media for adapting service offerings and operations. Ultimately a model of real-time enabled serviced development will be developed. 4 Anticipated Results (200): The research is expected to generate contributions on both a theoretical as well as practical level. It is anticipated that the study will contribute to existing service development and service innovations literature, by providing a revised model of the new service development process, under consideration of real-time enabled social media. Furthermore contributions will be made in the field of service development success factors. In addition to the theoretical contribution, managerial implications are provided by giving insights into the strategic management of services. Hospitality service providers are enabled to identify the critical factors of adopting social media for service development as well as the requirements for implementing the development process. 3

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