ABSTRACT
Hospitality businesses cannot succeed without their customers and more-
over without satisfying their customers’ needs. In this chapter we introduce
the idea of customer-centred business development and review the impor-
tance of understanding customer behaviour. We see this trend as being at
the heart of a new approach to hospitality business development, but
recognise that many of the issues have been long debated (Dick and Basu,
1994). Although we are part of a debate about introducing this as a new
idea, Shah et al. (2006) note that the debate has been going on for more
than 50 years. Undoubtedly we can point to a great deal of research that
supports the benefits for businesses that come from introducing the
processes that we will refer to as becoming customer-centred (Buzzell and
Gale, 1987; Zeithaml, 2000). As Clarke and Chen (2007) observed, the
focus on the firm itself concentrated management thinking on production
and internal administration, but putting the customer at the heart of
business necessitates a much broader concern. In the increasing competi-
tive environment of global competition, hospitality businesses value
customers more than as a simple source of revenues. Within these
contemporary competitive markets, Scott (2001) has identified that the
approval and loyalty of customers has been recognised as one of the key
success factors for hospitality businesses (Scott, 2001) and the service offer
has been shown to be one of the main determinants of customer satisfac-
tion and loyalty (Gronroos, 2000). As McDougall and Levesque (2000) have
observed, these factors now mean that from the position of hospitality
managers the service offer has become central to the business model and
must thus be seen as a vital strategic function within the business.
