Oberoi Hotels: Train Whistle in the Tiger Reserve

Ryan W. Buell; Ananth   Raman; Vidhya   Muthuram

Case | HBS Case Collection | January 2015 (Revised March 2015)

Oberoi Hotels: Train Whistle in the Tiger Reserve

by Ryan W. Buell, Ananth Raman and Vidhya Muthuram

Abstract

Celebrated as one of the world's premiere luxury hotel brands, Oberoi Hotels attracts and serves some of the most quality-sensitive guests in the world. The case considers the challenge of how an organization, with a standardized service model, can repeatedly delight customers whose expectations grow with every interaction. To explore this question, the case details the design elements of Oberoi's complex service operation, including its approaches to employee management and continuous improvement, as well as the dynamics of service competition in a rapidly growing market.

Keywords: service operations; service quality; service management; service quality competition; service delivery; Customer Management; customer satisfaction; Customer Service Excellence; Employee empowerment; employee engagement; employee training; india; hospitality; hotel industry; Service Delivery; Service Operations; Customer Satisfaction; Employees; Quality; Accommodations Industry; India;

Language: English

Format: Print

28 pages

Educators Purchase

Citation:

Buell, Ryan W., Ananth Raman, and Vidhya Muthuram. "Oberoi Hotels: Train Whistle in the Tiger Reserve." Harvard Business School Case 615-043, January 2015. (Revised March 2015.)

Through a large-scale field experiment with 389,611 customers considering opening a credit card account with a nationwide retail bank, we investigate how providing transparency into an offering’s tradeoffs affects subsequent rates of customer acquisition and long-run engagement. Although we find transparency to have an insignificant effect on acquisition rates, customers who were shown each offering’s tradeoffs selected different products than those who were not. Moreover, prospective customers who experienced transparency and subsequently chose to open an account went on to exhibit higher quality service relationships over time. Monthly spending was 9.9% higher and cancellation rates were 20.5% lower among those who experienced transparency into each offering’s tradeoffs. Increased product usage and retention accrued disproportionately to customers with prior category experience—more experienced customers who were provided transparency spent 19.2% more on a monthly basis and were 33.7% less likely to defect after nine months. Importantly, we find that these gains in engagement and retention do not come at the expense of customers’ financial wellbeing—the probability of making late payments was reduced among customers who experienced transparency. We further find that the positive effects of transparency on engagement and retention were attenuated in the presence of a promotion that provided financial incentives to choose particular offerings. Taken together, these results suggest that providing transparency into an offering’s tradeoffs may be an effective strategy for informing customer choices, leading to better outcomes for customers and firms alike.

Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2019

How Transparency into Internal and External Responsibility Initiatives Influences Consumer Choice: Evidence from the Field and Lab

Ryan W. Buell and Basak Kalkanci

Amid growing calls for transparency and social and environmental responsibility, companies are employing different strategies to improve consumer perceptions of their brands. Some pursue internal initiatives that reduce their negative social or environmental impacts through responsible operations practices (such as paying a living wage to workers or engaging in environmentally sustainable manufacturing). Others pursue external responsibility initiatives (such as philanthropy or cause-related marketing). Through three experiments, conducted in the field and lab, we compare how transparency into these internal and external initiatives affects customer perceptions and sales, and explore the psychological processes linking transparency to sales. The results provide converging evidence that transparency into a company’s internal responsibility practices can be at least as motivating of consumer sales as transparency into its external responsibility initiatives, incrementally increasing a consumer’s probability of purchase by 13.6% and 45.8% across our two field experiments, conducted in social and environmental domains, respectively. We further investigate the perceptual effects of transparency into internal and external responsibility initiatives and find that the underlying psychological mechanisms linking both types of transparency to consumer purchase intentions are highly consistent. Transparency into internal and external initiatives increases perceived altruism, cause sincerity, corporate ability, trust, favorability, and consumers’ beliefs that the company is an attractive employer, which in turn drives sales. Taken together, our results suggest that it may be in the interest of both business and society for managers to prioritize internal responsible operations initiatives, to achieve both top and bottom line benefits, while mitigating social and environmental harms.

Keywords: Sustainable Operations; corporate social responsibility; operational transparency; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Environmental Sustainability; Consumer Behavior; Perception;

Citation:

Buell, Ryan W., and Basak Kalkanci. "How Transparency into Internal and External Responsibility Initiatives Influences Consumer Choice: Evidence from the Field and Lab." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 19-115, May 2019. View Details

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