Influence of Social Interaction on Customer Experience in  Tourism Industry

Nidhi  Agarwal; Ashutosh  Mohan

Nidhi Agarwal Research Scholar, Institute of Management Studies, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India
Ashutosh Mohan Associate Professor, Institute of Management Studies, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India

Keywords: Social Interaction, Customer Experience, Tourist, Onsite phase, Customer Journey

Abstract

Customer experience has always been a pivot around which every industry revolves. Customer experience refers to sum total of beliefs, perception, feelings & emotions a person develops over a period of time. It is the entire customer journey in which the Customer experience is built up. Social Interaction is one of the contributing factors of customer experience. Social interaction occurs when two or more people communicate with each other intentionally or unintentionally. The level of interaction decides the customer experience. Tourists are the people who travel and visit a place (location) other than their usual surroundings for leisure purposes. The more friendly & helpful interaction a tourist encounters at the destination, the better his/her experience and vice-versa. Various factors influence the customer experience in the customer journey, but the paper focussed on only one factor i.e. social interaction. The paper consists of three objectives in which the first two objectives check the influence of social interaction based on gender and age-group of tourists during the onsite phase of customer journey, and the last objective is to find out the influence of Social interaction on customer experience during the onsite phase of customer journey. The questionnaire was prepared for conducting a survey, Kruskal-Wallis test and Spearman’s Rank
correlation analysis was performed to check the proposed hypothesis.