CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT FOR SERVICED APARTMENTS IN HO CHI MINH CITY, VIETNAM

Abstract

Customer relationship management (CRM) has become critical in today business world. It has been widely adopted as one of the marketing strategies especially for service-oriented businesses. Serviced apartment, not only does it provide space as a residential apartment, but also offers services as a hotel and its exclusive and personal touch for its customers. Thus, CRM plays a vital role in helping serviced apartment operators to better cater to their target market and build sustainably profitable relationships with them. In line with that, this dissertation aims to find out factors that affect customers’ expectation and evaluation on the basis of their service encounters. These factors however are internal to the customer itself as they are related to customer’s social, cultural and financial background. Other discussions also revolve around contributing factors that influence tenants’ choice of serviced apartments and their channels of searching in a specific context of Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), Vietnam. Literature reviews analyze serviced apartment industry as well as relevant concepts of marketing strategies like relationship marketing, customer satisfaction and expectation in order to offer a basic foundation. Research methodology is comprehensively examined in the third chapter, followed by chapter four with analysis of survey’s results. The findings show that customers’ age group, income level and nationality do affect their initial expectation about future accommodation in HCMC. Branding image and wide range of services available of a particular serviced apartment have come out as the most prominent reasons for customers’ choices. Factor analysis has assisted the author in uncovering other dimensions of the research. First is that some tenants tend to go for their home countries’ products, which can be observed in Asian nationalities like Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea and Taiwan. Secondly, the reasons that account most for customer leave of their former serviced apartments are failures in meeting their demands and poor service quality. Lastly, customers’ evaluation plays a role in determining their word-of-mouth referrals. In conclusion, research findings are summarized briefly, followed by discussions about limitations and recommendation for future work.