MANAGERIAL PERSPECTIVE OF CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT ON THE PERFORMANCE OF REGISTERED HOTELS IN NYERI COUNTY

Abstract

Tourism and Travel sector is fundamental in advancing social economic growth of nations. Hotel industry plays a major supportive role to the this sector by ensuring comfortable stay for the visitors through meeting their gastronomical, lodging and other related auxiliary needs. However, the industry is always faced with performance challenges due to its susceptibility to changes in internal and external environments. It has therefore been adopting strategies to improve on its performance and mitigate on any eventualities. One of such strategy is customer engagement, a component of value co-creation which is a process of collaboration by parties who are involved in direct interactions that is aimed at generating mutual value. Due to the dearth in studies on the effectiveness of customer engagement in the hotel industry, this study evaluated from a managerial perspective the effect of customer engagement on the performance of registered hotels in the Nyeri County. The research specifically was concerned on the sections of hotel that deal directly with the customer: F&B, Room Division and Sales and Marketing. The study used a descriptive research design and had a target population of the 61 registered hotels in the county of which only those with bed capacity of 25 and above (34 hotels) were considered as practically, they are the ones expected to be implementing the strategy. Census method was adopted in selecting the sample size due to the low number of registered hotels while purposive sampling was utilized in picking the respondents from the selected hotels. Questionnaire were used for data collection and were piloted to ensure validity and reliability during data collection. The Cronbach’s Alpha coefficient for the instrument was 0.754 which is above 0.7 thus ascertaining that the instrument was reliable for the data collection process. Data collected was analyzed descriptively and inferentially with the aid of Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). Diagnostic test was carried out before multiple regression analysis was carried out to measure the relationship between the dependent variable and independent variables. The findings indicate that customer engagement (β1 = 0.642 p< 0.05) had a positive relationship with significant effect on the performance of registered hotels and explained 35.9 per cent variance of the performance. Based on these findings, the study concluded that customer engagement have a positive effect on the performance of registered hotels in Nyeri county. Thus, concluding that firms that engage their customers more are more likely to outperform their counterparts