CirVath International Journal of Tourism 10

REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURES CUSTOMER ASSESSMENT In the absence of literatures on the term “customer assessment”, the author found and used the literatures on customer feedback. The definition of customer feedback according to Erickson and Eckrich (2001) is the customer interaction about a product or a service, which can be solicited or unsolicited (Berry & Parasuraman 1997). Sampson (1996) study states the company-solicited feedback through the use of tools such as surveys and focus groups that allow customers to give their judgment about the experienced product or service. On the other hand, unsolicited customer feedback is dependent on the customer’s willingness to share his/her experiences concerning the product or service (Sampson, 1996) and this unsolicited feedback is usually communicated through word of mouth (WOM) according to Day and Landon (1977). Considering the present generation, computer-based communication steered the increase of electronic word of mouth (eWOM) (Litvin, Goldsmith, & Pan 2008,). A form of computer-based communication is the utilization of social media, a platform that presented a new channel for the expression of customer’s assessment, a media where customer opinion becomes public. With the rise of social media, sharing feedback by customers has reached a new level of connectedness where social networking sites (SNS), video sharing, blogging, and wikis have transformed the way customers express their opinions, which influenced the relationships between customers and organizations (Libai, Bolton, Bu¨ gel, de Ruyter, Go¨tz, et.al. 2010). Lacey (2012) research findings show that customer’s opinion is positively and directly related to their desire to give their support to the organization by giving positive word of mouth and are willingly participate in the company’s marketing researches. Also, customer’s input contributes to the firm’s service quality control and is important in helping service providers understand customer needs and expectations much better.

Traditional Methods of Gathering Customer Assessment Long Range System (2014) article, discuss the problems with traditional methods of gathering customer feedback such as telephone surveys, paper comment cards, online survey links, which have low response rates. Comment cards are a thing of the past, especially for the guest segments for who smartphones are just a normal way of life (Brandau 2011). Customers see paper comment cards as oldfashioned and tedious. One common problem posed by those methods is that, because the response rates are low and it is not a representative sample. Another issue with these traditional methods is the manual inputting of data in creating a database (Long Range System 2014). The same issue with the use of secret shoppers, or mystery shoppers, to gather feedback. Results are more of criticism - 238 © CirVath - les Cahiers Internationaux du Tourisme - no 10