Virtual Customer Interactions and Customer-Producer Relationships

The Internet has created a tremendous impact on customer-producer communication, which is a strategic variable for the success of the business. Consequently, organizations have established Virtual Customer Environments (VCEs) such as interactive websites with online discussion forums, corporate pages in social networks, corporate blogs et cetera, which enable customers and producers to interact with each other. Such VCEs can be in different forms depending on the customer's role, played as product conceptualist, product designer, product tester, product supporter and product marketer. Interactions by customers concerning VCEs always return them as an online experience and relationship marketing is an outcome of online customer experience. The initial model of this study was developed using this theory and the study attempts to examine the impact of customer interactions on the nature of customer relationships with firms using product support oriented VCEs of the tourist hotels inSri Lanka. The research analysis was based on 52 tourist hotels from five-star to two-star by following the purposive sampling technique.