Literature Review on Customer Relationship Essay Example for Free

Literature Review on Customer Relationship Essay The hospitality industry is a broad category of fields within the service industry that includes lodging, restaurants, event planning, theme parks, transportation, cruise line, and additional fields within the tourism industry. The hospitality industry is a several billion dollar industry that mostly depends on the availability of leisure time and disposable income. â€Å"CRM†, or Customer Relationship Management, is one of the most important topics in the business world. Its attributes and consequences cannot be disaffirmed. Without proper customer relationship management, there is no way you can build interest and acquire and retain customers to the business, in order to be profitable. CRM features an embryonic reputation and it is getting among the most popular educational as well as useful subjects in the industrial area. Due to the competing atmosphere, it has turn into a niche with regard to a company’s overall performance. Still there is certainly restricted investigation which shows the relationship between CRM and hotels’ overall performance. Consequently this particular research is a try to give a worth conceptual model which describes the actual speculative linkages between CRM and hotel’s performance. This particular research just not explains the connection among CRM and hotel performance, but in addition describes the actual mediation part of promoting/marketing abilities in the relationship. â€Å"CRM is never done, it is an ongoing effort.† The essence of a customer-focused environment is a preliminary indication of how the hotel industry can truly benefit from a strategic and focused approach to CRM. Hotel companies have in evidence had recourse to elements of CRM for a variety of strategic and tactical reasons. It is argued that the success of a strategy depends not only on the ability of a company to identify and understand what its target customers genuinely need and want, but also on the companys ability to deliver enhanced value in terms of these specific needs and wants (Diana Luck and Geoff Lancaster ,2013). In order to remain competitive, hospitality and tourism companies must adopt the knowledge management approach (Ruhanen Cooper, 2004). As customers become more experienced at finding the best deals for hotels, restaurants, travel agencies, and tourist destinations, the hospitality and tourism organizations face increasingly intense worldwide competition. Considering  the severe competition and the nature of the industry, employees and managers have to acquire more knowledge, in order to consistently provide the best deals and service to customers. What is more, customers’ preferences can be various and changeable, requiring employees and managers to understand the changes and continue to provide the best experience (Hallin Marnburg, 2008). However, the question often posed is: What kind of knowledge should be obtained in order to gain competitive advantage (Ruhanen Cooper, 2004). One of the basic and most common sources of failure for CRM implementations is a missing customer strategy â€Å"as the creation of a unique and valuable position involving a different set of activities†. A robust customer strategy is based on customer segmentation is one of the first steps necessary when implementing a sound CRM solution (Gillies et al.2002). Human beings have had the urge to select and choose what to them can satisfy their desires since creation and will continue to have this desire because of their changing nature. This tendency makes them explore what to them is the best in terms of quality when purchasing, especially in the area of service consumption. This is supported by Palmer’s assertion that: â€Å"customers have always been concerned about quality and that the proliferation of competitive market for a lot of services has also made customers become more selective in the services they choose†. This attitude means that service providers must be innovative in their service provision and delivery. The Hotel Industry is also experiencing increased globalization, competition, higher customer turnover, growing customer acquisition costs and rising customer expectations, meaning that hotels’ performance and competitiveness is significantly dependent on their ability to satisfy customers efficiently and effectively. To enhance profitability and guest loyalty, hotels must nowadays focus on implementing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) strategies/techniques that aim to seek, gather and store the right information, validate and share it throughout the entire organization and then use it throughout all organizational levels for creating personalized and unique guests’ experiences (Nana Yaw Asabere and Vida Doku, IJAIEM, Volume 2, Issue 3, March 2013). To retain customers, the relationship with customers has to be managed in a long-term and trusting manner for mutual benefits. Thus, the adoption of CRM should enhance the hotels’ performance through increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty, declining customer acquisition costs and increasing profitability by customers who are willing to pay a premium for better services (Piccoli et al., 2003). Although CRM is imperative for organizational survival, its implementation has resulted in mixed outcomes (King and Burgess, 2008), which is customer oriented believing that customer loyalty increases organization’s profitability. Therefore, Performance is improved since CRM involves the ongoing process development of market intelligence for building and maintaining a profit-maximizing portfolio of customer relationship (see Zablah et al., 2004). Thus, the hotels are expected to use strategy that focused on customers in order to sustain their competitive advantage. For these hotels, the use of the financial measures is not only short-term oriented but also inadequate to capture the customer perspective of performance (Kaplan and Norton, 1996). Customer-related performance measures are therefore needed to quantify customer relationships (Shoemaker and Lewis, 1999) and to differentiate customers who are worthy of the CRM efforts (Noone et al., 2003). All participating hotels have practices in place to manage customer relationships. The most commonly cited goal for CRM is guest retention. Evaluation and control are perceived as very important activities not only to create value for the customers, but also to track the performance of the guest contact departments and the customers evaluations of the hotel/restaurant experiences (Ada S. Lo, Hong Kong, 2010). Freeland (2002) suggests that organization must address four critical strategies and understand the key interplay with them: * Identifying the customer * Selecting the most appropriate channel to reach the customer * Receiving the effects on the brands value * Determining the most appropriate CRM capabilities (Wolfgang Emperger, 2004) The use of a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application to create a business strategy is an excellent way to increase customer loyalty and customer retention. By personalizing a customers stay, a hotel can ensure that customers will come back again and again simply by remembering their favorite beverage, pillow or other preferred amenity (Nick Nikolis, Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/2066799).

Abigail Adams and How She Shaped the Role of Women in American History

Almost everyone’s heard of her, there have been numerous books written about her, several thousand letters accounted for that she wrote. She was also the wife of the second president and the mother to the sixth American president, who was this woman? She was Abigail Adams. Abigail Adams life didn’t acquire meaning solely from knowing and being around these two great men however, Adams was eminently worth knowing as an individual herself. Throughout the ages, women have always been involved in war but Abigail Adams brought a new concept to women and war with her involvement in the early colonial years and the American Revolution. Abigail Adams did many things in her lifetime but the questions I will be attempting to answer is how exactly did she impact the Revolutionary War and change the social roles of women in such a male dominated society. First and foremost, some basic knowledge on the early years and the foundation of Adam’s life are imperative to the understanding of Abigail Adams and how she grew into becoming the women she did. Abigail Adams was born Abigail Smith in a church in Weymouth, Massachusetts on November 11, 1744. Adams’s parents were William Smith, a liberal Congregational minister and her mother Elizabeth Quincy was of a prominent political family at the time. Abigail was the second born of four siblings, one brother and three sisters, their family faith was Congregational. The Adams’s were an active family in throughout the community and involved in the politics of the time. A majority of Adams’s younger days consisted of corresponding with family and friends and reading. Her childhood and young adult life didn’t involve much singing, dancing or card playing as young women typically participated in... ... Thoughts Life and Letters of Abigail Adams Gelles, Edith B. First Thoughts: Life and Letters of Abigail Adams . New York, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998. Dearest Friend: A life of Abigail Adams Withey, Lynne. Dearest Friend: A Life of Abigail Adams. New York, New York: Free Press Division of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1981. Abigail Adams - A Life Holton, Woody. Abigail Adams - A Life. New York, New York: Free Press A Division of Simon & Schuster Inc., 2009. Patriotism and the Female Sex, Abigail Adams and the American Revolution Skinner Keller, Rosemary. Patriotism and the Female Sex: Abigail Adams and the American Revolution. Brooklyn, New York: Carlson Publishing Inc., 1994. Abigail Adams, An American Women Akers, Charles. Abigail Adams, An American Women. Toronto, Canada and Boston, Massachusetts: Little Brown and Company, 1980.

Human Resources Information System Essay

A Human Resources Management System (HRMS) or Human Resources Information System (HRIS), refers to the systems and processes at the intersection betweenhuman resource management (HRM) and information technology. It merges HRM as a discipline and in particular its basic HR activities and processes with the information technology field, whereas the programming of data processing systems evolved into standardized routines and packages of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. On the whole, these ERP systems have their origin on software that integrates information from different applications into one universal database. The linkage of its financial and human resource modules through one database is the most important distinction to the individually and proprietary developed predecessors, which makes this software application both rigid and flexible. There are approximately 36 vendors of HRMS software in the U. S. and Canada[1]. The function of human resources (HR) departments is generally administrative and common to all organizations. Organizations may have formalized selection, evaluation, and payroll processes. Efficient and effective management of â€Å"human capital† progressed to an increasingly imperative and complex process. The HR function consists of tracking existing employee data which traditionally includes personal histories, skills, capabilities, accomplishments and salary. To reduce the manual workload of these administrative activities, organizations began to electronically automate many of these processes by introducing specialized human resource management systems. HR executives rely on internal or external IT professionals to develop and maintain an integrated HRMS. Before the client–server architecture evolved in the late 1980s, many HR automation processes were relegated to mainframe computers that could handle large amounts of data transactions. In consequence of the high capital investment necessary to buy or program proprietary software, these internally developed HRMS were limited to organizations that possessed a large amount of capital. The advent of client–server, application service provider, and software as a service (SaaS) or human resource management systems enabled increasingly higher administrative control of such systems. Currently human resource management systems encompass[citation needed]: 1. Payroll 2. Time and attendance 3. Performance appraisal 4.  Benefits administration 5. HR management information system 6. Recruiting/Learning management 7. Performance record 8. Employee self-service 9. Scheduling 10. Absence management 11. Analytics The payroll module automates the pay process by gathering data on employee time and attendance, calculating various deductions and taxes, and generating periodic pay cheques and employee tax reports. Data is generally fed from the human resources and time keeping modules to calculate automatic deposit and manual cheque writing capabilities. This module can encompass all employee-related transactions as well as integrate with existing financial management systems. The time and attendance module gathers standardized time and work related efforts. The most advanced modules provide broad flexibility in data collection methods, labor distribution capabilities and data analysis features. Cost analysis and efficiency metrics are the primary functions. The benefits administration module provides a system for organizations to administer and track employee participation in benefits programs. These typically encompass insurance, compensation, profit sharing and retirement. The HR management module is a component covering many other HR aspects from application to retirement. The system records basic demographic and address data, selection, training and development, capabilities and skills management, compensation planning records and other related activities. Leading edge systems provide the ability to â€Å"read† applications and enter relevant data to applicable database fields, notify employers and provide position management and position control. Human resource management function involves the recruitment, placement, evaluation, compensation and development of the employees of an organization. Initially, businesses used computer based information systems to: * produce pay checks and payroll reports; * maintain personnel records; * pursue talent management. Online recruiting has become one of the primary methods employed by HR departments to garner potential candidates for available positions within an organization. Talent management systems typically encompass: * analyzing personnel usage within an organization; identifying potential applicants; * recruiting through company-facing listings; * recruiting through online recruiting sites or publications that market to both recruiters and applicants. The significant cost incurred in maintaining an organized recruitment effort, cross-posting within and across general or industry-specific job boards and maintaining a competitive exposure of availabilities has given rise to the deve lopment of a dedicated applicant tracking system, or ‘ATS’, module. The training module provides a system for organizations to administer and track employee training and development efforts. The system, normally called a â€Å"learning management system† (LMS) if a stand alone product, allows HR to track education, qualifications and skills of the employees, as well as outlining what training courses, books, CDs, web based learning or materials are available to develop which skills. Courses can then be offered in date specific sessions, with delegates and training resources being mapped and managed within the same system. Sophisticated LMS allow managers to approve training, budgets and calendars alongside performance management and appraisal metrics. The employee self-service module allows employees to query HR related data and perform some HR transactions over the system. Employees may query their attendance record from the system without asking the information from HR personnel. The module also lets supervisors approve O. T. requests from their subordinates through the system without overloading the task on HR department. Many organizations have gone beyond the traditional functions and developed human resource management information systems, which support recruitment, selection, hiring, job placement, performance appraisals, employee benefit analysis, health, safety and security, while others integrate an outsourced applicant tracking system that encompasses a subset of the above. Assigning Responsibilities Communication between the Employees. The Analytics module enables organizations to extend the value of an HRMS implementation by extracting HR related data for use with other business intelligence platforms. For example, organizations combine HR metrics with other business data to identify trends and anomalies in headcount in order to better predict the impact of employee turnover on future output.

The Role of Women in Mans Downfall in Gilgamesh and The Hebrew Bible - Free Essay Example

Sample details Pages: 3 Words: 834 Downloads: 9 Date added: 2019/07/01 Category History Essay Level High school Topics: Gilgamesh Essay Did you like this example? Women have often been portrayed as a weakness for the male gender in various societies. The female theatrics and lies have been the source of the downfall for many men, as they have been depicted in ancient epics and Biblical stories. For instance, the Holy Scripture in the book of Genesis describes Eve, the first woman and the primary cause for Adam to eat the forbidden fruit and, in the process, disobeying God. Don’t waste time! Our writers will create an original "The Role of Women in Mans Downfall in Gilgamesh and The Hebrew Bible" essay for you Create order Imperatively, the consequences of such misguidance by the females have often led to suffering and despair of the opposite gender, where famous women misled their mighty male partners owing to their beauty and sexual power. One of the crucial tools of destruction used therein is the sexual consciousness, where sexual promises serve as an instrument of seduction. Women in the epic of Gilgamesh and the Hebrew Bible have been depicted in the manner illustrated above, that is, they are shown to have misled multiple mighty men from doing good. The two stories present females as wise and powerful, but on the flipside, the source of temptation and ruin. As illustrated above, women in fables and Biblical stories have been depicted as individuals of magnificent power and wisdom. Conversely, they play a central role in the hindrance of success by mighty men to serve a good cause in the society. The epic of Gilgamesh portrays two females, who are an epitome of wisdom and in a complex twist of events manipulate the men they interact with and lead them to eventual downfall. One of them is Priestess, the first woman to have tamed the wild, namely Enkidu. More specifically, Princess Shamhat went to the wilderness and stripped herself naked in a bid to entice this man to sleep with her (Greenblatt and Carol 11). As a result, Enkidu remained erect for seven days, after which he gave in to the sexual demand and made love to the sorceress. The love-making act by Enkidu and Shamhat proved to be his source of downfall since the former was rejected in the wilderness (8). After accomplishing the mission of taming Enkidu, the princess returned to he r normal life, while Enkidu was rejected in the wild. In this regard, it is evident that it is her who succeeded in taming him, the act that became his prominent downfall. The second woman playing a central part in the Epic of Gilgamesh to have misled a man is Shiduri, the tavern-keeper. Gilgamesh met her while wandering in the wilderness, the main purpose of which was seeking immortality for himself. In the text, Shiduri is portrayed as a person of great wisdom; she ever offers her ideas to King Gilgamesh by questioning his judgment regarding life (35). Thus, for instance, she informs him that he should forget his grief and focus on enjoying every single day since death is inevitable. However, the man refuses to follow these recommendations and finally ends up suffering and failing miserably in his quest to live forever. Similarly, The Hebrew Bible depicts women as individuals who have the power of misleading men. Through various illustrations provided therein, it is evident that females are indeed the source of the downfall for males, an illustrative example provided therein is that from the story of Samson and Delilah. In brief, Samson is a prolific Nazarite warrior, who is extensively depended upon by his tribemates. The secret source of this mans strength lies in his hair, but Delila, using lies and sexual attractiveness, convinces him to reveal to her the source of his power. He does so, and it eventually translates to the woman cutting off his hair and, in the process, ripping him of his authority and strength. The two above analyzed stories present women as persons of much wisdom and power; but on the flipside, they are also the primary source of temptation and ruin for their male counterparts. By means of lies and their sexual power, females control and manipulate men, using them for their own good. The stories in Gilgamesh and texts taken from Hebrew Bible, as exemplified by Samson and Delilah, affirm that women were indeed the source of mens ruins. Thus, Shiduri from the Epic of Gilgamesh is portrayed as an individual of extensive intelligence and life wisdom, but she uses it for nothing else except for the downfall of the King of Gilgamesh. Similarly, the Biblical story mentioned above depicts Delila as the cause of Samsons destruction. Indeed, women have been historically shaped in literature as sorceresses and manipulators, and men, although portrayed as the stronger gender, have been described as easy victims of the wisdom of their weak female counterparts. Although males are indeed the central characters in many Biblical texts and the Epic of Gilgamesh alike, the role of women therein can hardly be overestimated. Despite the negativity associated to women in the two posts, it can be justified that the women play a crucial role in the society. Shiduri depicted to be a wise woman who has good intentions to help.