Benchmarking and its Impact on Improving Customer Service: An Applied Study in Travel and Tourism Companies in Holy City of Karbala

Abstract

This paper aims at defining the concept of benchmarking in improving the services provided to customers. The research community represents the travel and tourism companies operating in holy city of Karbala, and a random sample of 50 employees has been selected, distributed among 20 travel and tourism companies. The following statistical methods have been also relied on (arithmetic mean, standard deviation and Relative importance) in order to give a statistical description of the sample surveyed. The current study has set a number of conclusions, the most silent one is that tourism and travel companies’ adoption of the benchmarking method in their work leads to knowing the negative factors that occur in them and the way of finding appropriate solutions for them. It is also concluded that there is an increase in the interest of travel and tourism companies in adopting and applying benchmarking as one of the tools for continuous improvement and development and not as a method of spying on other companies