This exploratory research used Diffusion of Innovations (Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, 4th Edition, The Free Press, New York, 1995) to examine and benchmark organisational use of the simplest and most prevalent Internet technology, e-mail. The answers, by 200 Singaporean travel agencies, to a mock customer's e-mail reflect poor e-mail customer service. This study found odds of one in four of receiving a reply and a minuscule three chances in 100 of receiving a response that followed suggested guidelines for treating e-mail as business communication.
Managerial implications include benchmarks and guidelines for e-mail customer service, and shifting organisational resources from websites and towards e-mail. Academically, the results support organisational adoption of innovations in stages, organisational age as an independent variable and branded e-mail addresses as a dependent variable related to e-mail adoption, and possible bandwagon effects in adopting websites.
The fictitious Ms. Wenyong Zhang is finally online and thrilled to experience what her friends and school-age children take for granted. She has a computer at home, an e-mail address and access to the World Wide Web. Ms. Zhang hopes to use this Internet access to arrange her family's upcoming vacation in Bali.
Websites and e-mail should make vacation planning—a potentially tedious process discussing prices, tour packages, etc.—easier. Instead of calling or visiting travel agents during business hours, travellers find relevant information on the Web and e-mail questions any time of day. Likewise, agents update their websites and reply to travellers’ inquiries at their convenience. “Information technology will drive a brave, new world of marketing—provided marketers figure out how IT can help them” (Dev & Olsen, 2000, p. 55). There is a need for research into the dynamics of technology and tourism (Hjalager, 2002) as well as online service quality (Zsidisin, Jun, & Adams, 2000).
Five years ago, most organisations questioned the necessity of going online. Today, most organisations question how to leverage their online presence (Porter, 2001). From obtaining a free e-mail address with Hotmail or Yahoo! to a stage three personalised website (Hanson, 2000), today's quest is better returns on the time and money invested in online technologies.
New technologies enable more effective tourism marketing, releasing staff from back-office tasks in order to spend more time on personalised customer services (Poon, 1993). The Internet may transform the tour agents’ traditional role from transaction processor to consultant (Raymond, 2001; Bloch & Segev, 1996; Milne, 1996). Threatened by disintermediation (Standing & Vasudavan, 1999) and large online travel companies, increased personalisation may help travel agencies survive (Raymond, 2001).
Yet, as organisations tend to misuse technology in the short run (Fidler, 1997; Rogers, 1995), are travel agents misusing the Internet by failing to provide personalised customer services such as properly responding to e-mails?
This paper uses diffusion of innovations (Rogers, 1995) as a theoretical base to benchmark and investigate how travel agencies use e-mail for customer service. The methodology avoids a common limitation of organisational diffusion research—relying upon stated behaviour (Rogers, 1995)—by e-mailing travel agents and measuring their actual behaviour.
The results generalise to Singapore Tourism Board members, but fail to generalise to non-members, agencies outside Singapore and other industries. The Singapore Tourism Board may update member e-mail addresses infrequently, which could contribute to the poor results. Some agencies may have objected to being listed in the bcc field or had filters that rejected mail in the bcc field (Pechlaner et al., 2002). Furthermore, the authors double checked the coding of responses, but did not test coding reliability as Krippendorff (1980) suggests for content analysis of text such as that in e-mail.
