Influence of Knowledge Management on Customer Satisfaction in Four and Five Star Hotels in Nairobi County, Kenya

Abstract

Knowledge management has been embraced by many business establishments in Kenya. The hotel sector however still lags behind in terms of scale of application and amount empirical research as compared to other fields. Further, the hotels sector continues to face a myriad of challenges including stiff competition among players in the sector. The aim of this study was to establish the influence of knowledge management on customers’ satisfaction in hospitality industry in Kenya. The study was specifically focused on how knowledge acquisition, creation, sharing, storage and documentation and utilization influence customers’ satisfaction in four-star and five-star hotel establishments in Nairobi. In conducting the study the researcher was guided by the knowledge based view of the firm, social capital theory and expectation disconfirmation theory. The knowledge based view theory was greatly favored by the research simply because it considers firms as sources, assimilators, developers and exploiters of different types of knowledge. The study adopted a descriptive research design. Stratified random sampling was used to arrive at the sample size. The target population comprised of 1872 hotel employees and 2072 boarding customers respectively among the twenty-eight hotels which included four-star and five-star hotel establishments in Nairobi County. Employees on short term engagement were not included in the study due to their transitory nature which would have led to bias in their responses. A sample size of three hundred and twenty-four employees (324) and four hundred and fifteen boarding customers (415) was selected. Data collection was done using two structured questionnaires. The questionnaires were tested for validity and reliability using the cronbach alpha test. Analysis of the data collected was done using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences version 26.0 from which both descriptive and inferential statistics were obtained. Results on regression analysis indicated that there was a strong positive correlation (R=0.998, p-value of 0.000) between knowledge management and customers’ satisfaction. The findings further indicated that knowledge acquisition, knowledge creation, knowledge sharing and knowledge utilization have significant influence on customers’ satisfaction while knowledge storage and documentation does not have a significant influence on customers’ satisfaction. The researcher concludes that knowledge management positively and strongly influences customer satisfaction. The study recommends that hotels should adopt knowledge management practices in order to enhance customers’ satisfaction.