Staging Personalization: A Service Design Perspective

The importance of personalization has been widely recognized in hospitality industry for its impact on customer satisfaction and product differentiation. Studies have been conducted to understand the practice of personalization and the consequences such as customer acceptance, satisfaction, and loyalty. However, little is known about the design process of personalization in hotels while service providers are recognized as a key stakeholder in customer personalization. This study approached hoteliers to explore how a service environment is staged for customers to experience personalized service in hotels. Our findings reveal that personalization practices in hotels are staged based on senior management’s understanding of customer segments, and implementation difficulties at frontlines, and corporate culture, while on-site improvisation by frontline staff determine the effectiveness of the staging efforts. The originality of this study rests on the perspective it takes to understand personalization and developing insights that are grounded in the hospitality context. Studying personalization from a service design perspective (rather than a customer’s or employee’s perspective as most previous studies did) enables us to unearth new aspects of personalization.