Services Marketing in the Era of Disruption and Digital Transformation

Recent sound academic research reconfirmed that at the core of many successful service firms is an adequate services marketing (people, technology, strategy) approach by building the relationships and maintaining loyal customers within the targeted, acquired, and retained segments, beyond their necessary but not sufficient satisfaction, better understanding the drivers of customer churn, and acting accordingly, using an effective CRM strategy. Two years have passed since the World Economic Forum launched the project “The Digital Transformation Initiative (DTI)” as part of the “System Initiative on Shaping the Future of Digital Economy and Society”, and at the beginning of this year the World Economic Forum in collaboration with Accenture already published the white paper “Digital Transformation Initiative. Aviation, Travel and Tourism Industry”, by highlighting, among other aspects, the importance for the companies along the Aviation, Travel and Tourism industry journey of optimizing customer experience (CX) by collecting and exchanging data, and continuously generating insights. There is no doubt that the current modern marketing landscape has been redefined by faster changing technologies and customer expectations, and it has become essential having a capability of testing fast new ideas, refining them, and bringing them rapidly to the relevant market, better understanding the customer journeys and delivering a great CX, by building out a maturity model for CX. There is a real need of a holistic approach of revenue management and its relation to agile marketing, considering the tourist experience in the current customer-driven era. Recent evidence comes in favor of successful service firms which are moving further in the direction of: so-called experiential offerings as differentiation strategy by optimizing experience for sizable groups of “connected” traveling customers; focusing on high priority CX initiatives involving big-data or technology interventions which improve traveler perceptions; using algorithms which provides tailored travel recommendations by drawing data from users’ social media; winning the social media fights by right managing online sentiments and so on.