The crux of his research focused on the technological aspects of CRM supporting is the essence of rising above all these other forms of unwanted communication and staying relevant for the long-term to prospects and customers. Research Design

The proposed research design will focus on interviewing approximately 500 customers of Latin American tourism providers in the last twelve months and assessing their relative levels of satisfaction using a survey designed using the SERVQUAL methodology. Using a series of questions included in the SERVQUAL instrument to focus on the ten aspects of service quality including reliability, responsiveness, competence, access, courtesy, communication, credibility, security, understanding the customer and tangibles of service. Consistent with the goal of this study to focus on the gap between service delivery ad expectations (Huang, Sarigllu, 2008) the research design will be stratified by originating nation of the respondent. This stratification of responded by country will be useful in using Hofstede Cultural Dimensions (Blodgett, Bakir, Rose, 2008).

Methodology

Relying on Simple Random Sampling to stratify the respondents across the top ten nations that have visitors to Latin America as tourists in 2008, the research methodology seeks to be representative to those regions of the world who have cultural factors that lead to high levels of loyalty already. As was mentioned earlier, the Hofstede Cultural Dimensions Model (Blodgett, Bakir, Rose, 2008) will be used during the analysis phase of the results to further delineate and explain the variations in countries who have the majority of visitors to Latin American nations.

Second, the respondents will be obtained through Latin American nations' tourism offices, specifically those who have e-mailed these offices asking for packets of information. A cross-section of the top ten service providers will also be contacted for respondents as well.

Third, the survey will be sent via e-mail and also by mail when mailing addresses are available. A $5 Starbuck's card will be offered to those respondents in nations that have outlets from the coffee chain. The Latin American tourism offices and service providers will be asked to donate the costs of these incentives as the summary of results will be shared with them. On those nations that do not have Starbucks' the incentive will be a $5 gift card on Amazon.com also underwritten by Latin American service providers.

Results will be captured in Zoomerang, a free online service for capturing survey data. In addition, the free downloadable version of SPSS Version 16 will be used for analyzing the results. The use of basic and advanced statistical analysis functions will be used throughout the analysis phase.

The following hypotheses will the basis of the research:

Hypothesis 1: There is a statisticallysignificant relationship between existing CRM strategies and a baseline level of performance as measured by SERVQUAL that shows the need for greater conversation levels with loyal customers.

Hypothesis 2: Customers who visited Latin America in the last twelve month prefer to get their travel information through Web 2.0- technologies over traditional means of media.

Hypothesis 3: SERVQUAL performance is higher for those Latin American tourism providers who use Web 2.0 technologies and social networking as part of their core strategy.

Expected Results of Research

With the objective of defining a benchmark level of performance with regard to Latin American service providers that can be standardized on SERVQUAL, it is assumed that this will be accomplished through the methodology of this study. The implications of social networking and Web 2.0 technologies on customers' changing preferences for how they communicate with Latin American tourism service providers will show significant upside potential for these providers to change their strategies to speak with customers globally how they prefer.

Appendix:

TABLE 1:

WEB 2.0 CRM APPLICATIONS

Applications

Descriptions

Blogs

Online diary or journal entry on the Internet, which primarily supports text, photo (photoblog), video (vlog), and audio (podcast) formats

Google, AOL, and Yahoo offer free blogging platforms

Mashup

Web service that gathers related content from more than one source

IBM's mashup applications enable project managers to match team resources with a map to identify the geographical locations of the resources

Peer-to-Peer Networking technique for effectively sharing music, audio, and text files

Napster and Gnutella are popular peer-to-peer networks

Real Simple Syndication (RSS)

Feed-based technology that, with the aid of an RSS reader, enables users to subscribe to newly released content such as text, Web pages, sound files, photos, and video

RSS feed may contain the full content, for example a podcast, or simply a link to the content

Social Media

Encompasses all online tools (blogs, podcasts, Wikis, social networks,...

2008, et.al.)