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In recent years, CRM has grown in importance in the fields of business strategy, marketing management, information technology, and among academics and practitioners (Almotairi, 2017). More recently, the CRM concept has become one of the most controversial issues and it's considered by many researchers as a focal-center in the business field. For Navimipour & Soltani, (2016), CRM is an important concept to maintain competitiveness at e-commerce. For this reason, most of the previous works propose that it is essential for hotels to adopt know-how capitalizing and CRM technologies to help hotel managers improve their organizational performance. According to Chetioui et al, (2017), CRM can be successful only if customer information is effectively transformed to customer knowledge. Furthermore, the terms of CRM with its modern concept emerged in the 1990s and it was developed as a part of a business strategy to select and manage the most valuable customer relationships. Implementation of the CRM process requires developing a change in the organization, structure, the business processes, organizational commitment and human resource management (Agarwal et al, 2004; Oynuga et al, 2019). Although the successful implementation of CRM factors including strategy, employees, technology and processes are important, human resources have an integral role in building customer relationships (Taghavi et al, 2017). For this, CRM is one of the major sources of competitive advantage in hotels sector. According to (Al-Azzam, 2016), it is essential that hotels should adopt new strategy such as CRM technology to help hotel managers, service customers and to improve organizations performance. In Algeria, the hotels sector operates in a business environment that is illustrated by strong competition in the last few years, making it vulnerable to international competition namely Maghrebian competition. Besides, the construction rates of hotels in Algeria have increased between 2000 and 2017 through the help of the state by several investment options.
This also reveals that hotel performance in Algeria needs development, in other words, hotel managers need to use an appropriate strategy and practice to develop their performance. At the same time, the effect of CRM implementation on organization performance has not received adequate attention from academics and there are still a few of empirical researches in this field. In addition to justification for this study regarding to CRM technology and hotels performance, previous research have demonstrated the importance of knowledge capitalization (tacit and explicit) to improve the overall organizations performance namely hotels performance. Thus, the relationship between the disciplines of CRM with KM) is an important field of research at present. For Zack et al, (2009), KM has been considered as a key tool for enhancing organizational efficiency and performance and provides organizations with opportunities of having the ability of recognizing chances in the market and to increase their competitive privilege. KM concentrates on identification, acquisition, extraction, analysis, interpretation and sharing of tacit and explicit knowledge in organizations, as well as on tools, methods and obstacles in knowledge diffusion (Brahami & Matta, 2018; Brahami & Matta, 2019). In the other definition, the knowledge management involves the combination of internal and external information and converts them into an active knowledge using several technologies namely data mining, text mining and semantic web (Brahami & Matta, 2018; Brahami & Matta, 2015). However, in spite of the wide use of CRM in the organizations, there have been only limited studies and publications within the hotels sector.
In the context mentioned above, this paper tends to bring attention to the application KM and CRM dimensions in the hospitality industry. It presents and discusses the main findings of a study undertaken among a sample of large hotels Algerian, identifying and discussing the main motivations for KM and CRM systems utilization and adoption in order to improve hotels performance. A survey of 60 hotels executives was conducted on hotels operating in the Algeria west territory. The two major focuses of this study are: