The Role Of Customer Satisfaction And Customer Loyalty In Organisational Success A Focus On Disneyland Paris

Introduction to the company

Disneyland Paris is located on a 5510 acre land in Paris, France. The company has two themed parks namely Disneyland Park and Walt Disney Studios Park. The company also has seven themed resort hotels, a dining, shopping, and entertainment complex known as Disney Village, two convention centres, and a 27-hole golf facility (The Walt Disney Company 2019). Out of the 5510 acres, about half of the land has been developed and the remaining half is still undergoing development (The Walt Disney Company 2019). The Disneyland Park has five themes areas namely Discoveryland, Adeventureland, Fantasyland, Frontierland, and the Main Street USA. In these areas are themes shows, attractions, merchandise shops, restaurants, and refreshment stands (The Walt Disney Company 2019). In addition, the Park features a daily parade and an entertainment event every night. On the other hand, Walt Disney Studios Park has four themed areas namely Front Lot, Backlot, Production Courtyard, and Toon Studio and in these areas are shows, attractions, merchandise shops, refreshment stands, and restaurants (Disneyland Paris 2020). Beginning the year 2021, Disneyland Paris is expected to launch a multi-year expansion of Walt Disney Studios Park in which three themed areas will be added namely Frozen, Marvel, and Star Wars. Within Disneyland Paris are hotels and other facilities: the resort hotels have about 5800 rooms and eight on-site hotels that are owned and operated by third parties, which provide about 2575 rooms (Disneyland Paris 2020).

The main services provided by Disneyland Paris are parks and experiences. The company also provides consumer products such as licensing of its trade names, visuals, characters, and literary among other intellectual properties to different game developers, manufacturers, retailers, and publishers cross the world (Disneyland Paris 2020). The company also sells branded merchandise and develops and publishes magazines, comic books, and books. In all its operations, Disneyland Paris focuses on customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, which are integral to the success of the company as they provide profitable and sustainable relationships with consumers. This essay aims at exploring how Disneyland Paris has developed customer satisfaction and customer loyalty and how the two relate to the formation of profitable and sustainable relationship with consumers.

Customer satisfaction/loyalty strategies adopted by Disneyland Paris

Customer satisfaction can be defined as the judgment that a product or service offered by a company will provide customers a pleasurable level of consumption-related fulfilment, which includes levels of under or over fulfilment (Khairawati 2020). Business organisations often determine customer satisfaction through the development of products and quality as well as the development of services and their improvement, which is aimed at meeting the expectations of customers (Soriano et al. 2012). Disneyland Paris has adopted several strategies in order to promote customer satisfaction. First, the company’s priority is customer experience (Disneyland Paris 2020) and as such develops and improves its products and services to better meet the needs of its customers. Disneyland Paris is also devoted to research, which is fully oriented on maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction (Disneyland Paris 2020). Through such research, the company seeks to comprehend the market and evaluate its products/services in relation to how well they meet the needs of the market and as a result, develop products and services to make guest experience more pleasurable. In addition, the company values the voice of the guest, which is used to further develop its products and services for increased customer satisfaction in the future (Disneyland Paris 2020). The company has a dedicated market analysis team that designs surveys, publishes them, and reports, analyses, and determines the action plan (Disneyland Paris 2020). Through this, the company has been able to map changes in consumer preferences and these are then reflected in the services and products and quality offered by Disneyland Paris. Further, the company maintains a friendly relationship with its customers and as such is able to collect information on guest satisfaction (Disneyland Paris 2020), which has been essential in product development in the company. Follow-up is also conducted to establish whether the new products and services better meet the expectations of customers thus giving them a great experience. For example, the company would assess the customers’ perception of their rooms and based on the generated information improve their rooms and after the improvement the same survey is conducted to establish if the improvement fulfilled the purpose it was intended.

Customer loyalty refers to the will by a customer to buy the products or services offered by a particular company instead of those provided by the competitors (Khairawati 2020). Customer loyalty at Disneyland Paris is motivated by the words of Walt Disney, “whatever you do, do it well. Do it well so that when people see you do it, they will want to come back and see you do it again, and they will want to bring others and show them how well you do what you do.” Primarily, Disneyland Paris ensures that their products and services are of the highest quality and they give guests exceptional experience, which keeps the quests coming back and recommending the company to others. Through the use of themes, Disneyland Paris has been able to create a loyal customer base (Disneyland Paris 2020). Disneyland Paris has also actively built harmonic relationship with its customers, which according to Shahrestani et al. (2017) contributes to building customer loyalty. Indeed, Disneyland Paris has come to be known as the King of customer experience, which keeps customers coming back to the park.

Customer satisfaction/loyalty strategies and sustainable relations with customers

Customer satisfaction and customer loyalty have an imperative role for business sustainability especially in the service industry (Shin et al. 2017). Indeed, customer satisfaction allows customers to develop positive impression on the product and service offered by a firm, which leads to customer loyalty and ultimately long-term profitable and sustainable customer-firm relationship (Ngo and Nguyen 2016). There is therefore no doubt that the customer satisfaction/loyalty strategies adopted by Disneyland Paris have positively impacted the sustainability and profitability of the firm. As earlier noted, Disneyland Paris conducts survey on its customers to establish how customer experience can be made more sensational and this has resulted to Disneyland Paris being referred to as the king of customer experience something its competitors have not been able to attain. As aforementioned, Disneyland Paris values the voice of its customers, which has shaped the belief that Disneyland Paris first priority is customer experience. This has resulted to customers feeling that the company is committed to making them happy and as a result they look forward to spending their next holiday or vacation in the park. This relationship can be said to be sustainable because the company has given its customers a reason to look forward to the next event. Disneyland Paris by focusing on great customer experience has remained profitable: the company is not afraid of spending to make customer experience more sensation and similarly, customers are willing to pay just to be in the park (Disneyland Paris 2020). Further, the aspect of the company ‘doing whatever it decides to do very well’ has enabled it to attract even more customers while creating a loyal customer base, which promotes the sustainability of the company. In fact, customers have developed a positive impression on the product and service offered by Disneyland Paris and this positive attitude plays a significant role in rebuying the product, which is related to the profitability and sustainability of Disneyland Paris. Finally, Disneyland Paris has been able to develop and maintain a harmonic relationship with its customers, which signifies long-term profit and sustainable relationship with customers on a win-win basis. Therefore, Disneyland Paris’ profitability can be seen as a reward to the customer satisfaction/loyalty strategies adopted by the company.

Conclusion and Recommendation

The study establishes that Disneyland Paris has successfully used customer satisfaction and customer loyalty strategies to develop and maintain profitable and sustainable relationships with customers. The company prioritises great customer experience, which has promoted rebuy behaviour among its customers and this can be used to predict that the company will continue having profitable and sustainable relationships with its customers in the future. The essay also establishes that Disneyland Paris main focus is on customer satisfaction and less attention is paid to customer loyalty. According to Ong and Zien Yusoff (2015), there is a positive relationship between customer loyalty and business sustainability, which implies that Disneyland Paris could leverage customer loyalty for more profitable and sustainable relationships with customers. As such, it us recommendable that Disneyland Paris develops a customer loyalty programme that will be used to reward loyal customers with an aim of encouraging repurchases. The customer loyalty programme should be more like a special offer gift to loyal customers who have membership cards or discount price promo for recurrent customers.

References

• Disneyland Paris 2020. General information about Disneyland Paris. [Online] Available at https://www.disneylandparis.com/en-us/information/ [Accessed 29 April 2020]
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• Shahrestani, M.F., Mohammadnia, A. and Faramarz, B., 2017. The Effects of Customer Relationship Management on the Loyalty: Evidence from the Iranian Insurance Sector. International Journal of Economic Perspectives, 11(3).
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• Soriano, D.R., Gonçalves, H.M. and Sampaio, P., 2012. The customer satisfaction‐customer loyalty relationship. Management Decision.
• The Walt Disney Company 2019. Fiscal year 2019 annual financial report. [Online] Available at https://thewaltdisneycompany.com/app/uploads/2020/01/2019-Annual-Report.pdf [Accessed 29 April 2020]