Influencing Factors And Improving Strategies Of Customer Experience Quality In Smart Hotels

The development and construction of smart hotels is a key means to adapt to the upgrading of tourism consumption in the digital era.It is also an important way to promote the recovery and sustainable development of the hotel industry under the normalization of the epidemic.How to effectively ensure the customer experience quality(CEQ)is a hot issue of concern for smart hotel management and academia.The existing literature provides limited insights into CEQ in smart hotels,which cannot meet the intense management practices required by reality.However,CEQ in the context of smart hotels is a very complex system that is the result of coupling multiple factors.Previous studies have mostly focused on the net effect of variables,making it difficult to answer questions such as which factors are acting together and in what way for the emergence of a certain outcome.Based on complexity theory and cue theory,this study adopts the configuration path and takes smart hotels as the research object.It aims to refine the factors affecting the CEQ and analyze the causal combinations and asymmetric relationships to summarize their common patterns.A mixed research approach was used in this study.First,the influencing factors were extracted by coding layer by layer from the online review materials of smart hotels through content analysis.Then,the raw data are transformed into standardized data after coding assignment.The coded data are analyzed using fsQCA to obtain effective configuration paths for CEQ in different smart hotel contexts.Finally,the research results of this thesis are obtained as follows.(1)Customers’ evaluation of smart hotel experience focuses on eight aspects,including human service,value attribute,security service,geographical location,intelligent service,self-motivation,supporting environment and food and beverage quality.(2)A single factor cannot be a necessary condition for optimizing customer experience.However,it is worth noting that low-value attribute is an "almost always necessary" condition,which means that low-value attribute is closely related to non-high CEQ.(3)Sufficient conditions analysis identified nine different groupings of eight determinants that produce high or non-high CEQ.There are two two-factor-driven configurations and two three-factor-driven configurations in the high CEQ path.Human service,intelligent service and supporting environment mostly appear as core conditions of CEQ,while value attributes,security service,geographical location,self-motivation and beverage quality usually appear as marginal conditions.(4)The paths of CEQ of smart hotels exist in two directions of promotion and hindrance,and the study identifies a total of six paths that can achieve high CEQ of smart hotels and three paths that can achieve non-high CEQ.Based on a qualitative perspective,this thesis exploratively identifies the dimensions of customer experience evaluation concerns in the context of smart hotels,and systematically and effectively mines the decision model of smart hotel evaluation,which enriches the theoretical connotation of CEQ and expands the research horizon of topics related to smart hotels.This study addresses the limitations of the existing literature by providing a novel conceptual and empirical framework that complements the important practical knowledge of customer experience management in smart hotels.In addition,the research method of fsQCA is applied to deeply explore the homogeneity of CEQ in smart hotels,focusing on the synergistic effect and priority of multiple factors of hotel experience.It enhances scholars to have a more comprehensive and systematic cognitive structure in this field,and provides new ideas for empirical research on smart services and customer experience in hotels.