Alert-Driven Customer Relationship Management in Online Travel Agencies: Event-Condition-Actions Rules and Key Performance Indicators

Abstract

Currently, online travel agencies (OTA) allow their customers to make timely travel reservations anytime and anywhere through websites and mobile technologies. Customer service is vital to the success of any tourism and hospitality business, including online travel agencies. One major challenge that online travel agencies face is continuously declining customer experience because this may result in a high customer churn rate. Customer relationship management (CRM) is a strategy used by most organizations to increase customer lifetime value by selecting customers and maintaining their relationships. Delivering timely and consistently higher customer service levels are the goal of every OTA, and they need to evolve and implement a new approach to address customer issues proactively to increase customer retention and loyalty. This study analyzes some common CRM workflows of OTAs and proposes an alert-driven approach to CRM to enhance their effectiveness in creating satisfying customer experiences and retaining customers.