The impact of internal communication on customers’ perception of revenue strategies

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on communication, specifically internal communication, which is often underestimated when changes to management strategy affect both employees and customer perception. The article focuses on the front-office team in a hotel that is carrying out a new revenue strategy. Typically, this involved some internal communication about the new revenue strategy. How this information was delivered to the front desk employees and the value of the information is discussed in this article. The data was gathered by means of semi-structured, face-to-face interviews with five experts, and showed that in most cases the front desk employees either received some form of training or at least some information about the new system. The data also illustrates that this information was beneficial and helped the front desk employees deal with situations where customers had been given a room rate via an online travel agency (OTA) or booking platform and the employees had to deal with the confusion caused for the customer and agree on a room rate. Most of the staff were empowered to make adjustment to the price to satisfy the customers. Internal communication appears to play a more important role in achieving customer satisfaction when comparing the outcome of the research with academic literature. The latter often illustrates that companies focus more on consumer marketing (external communication for customers) and not enough on internal communication.

KEYWORDS:

• customer perception
• front office
• internal communication
• revenue management
• room rate changes