Customer relationship management systemic model in Mexican small, micro and medium enterprises for the hotelier sector

Currently in Mexico and the world the economy is characterized by factors such as socio/political/monetary issues competitiveness, technological innovation and the global nature of markets. Given this complex, random and demanding environment, companies must adopt new management practices to ensure their viability and competitiveness in the market. To survive in today's competitive environment, they must be transformed from their roots; its management philosophy will be focused on achieving sustainable competitive advantages based on knowledge of "what makes a difference" from the competition. To achieve this distinction, companies must generate value added services, i.e. require insight into customers to properly understand their needs, so it is essential to establish relationship activities with them, allowing them to achieve that knowledge. In this paper it is presented the Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) as an essential tool for improving the competitiveness of Small and Micro companies, enabling their presence in complex markets. Thanks to advances produced in ICT, particularly in areas such as management and data storage and capabilities of the Internet, individualized relationships with many customers and greater knowledge of them is possible. CRM (Customer Relationship Management) arises inside of ICT. It was in the 90s and has become a key tool for managing today's businesses. Taking a strategic analysis of the current situation of this sector in Mexico, it is possible to note that hotel companies face an increasingly competitive environment, in which the contest is the increase in quality without increase in price, while loyalty to the customer is decreasing. It has been found the customers are now more experienced and demanding and there is a growing monopoly in the industry and a strong increase in available hotel offers. The systemic knowledge will study the tourism sector, conceptualize, and observe the sector as a system and fully display the mature of their interrelationships. Therefore, the concept of hotel companies will be addressed from the systemic approach. Furthermore, at present the degree of development and implementation of CRM in the Mexican hotel industry cannot be considered fully examined and part of the problem is to determine characteristics of this sector, which affect to a greater degree the implementation of CRM. This research arises to ascertain if the implementation of a CRM initiative involves organizational change and therefore is feasible to design a systemic model for its implementation that has valid measurement scales and is reliable for different variables of the proposed model. These variables could influence the success and result of a CRM strategy. We therefore propose a new definition of CRM from a systemic point of view.