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Toward a customer-centric perspective of customer experience
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Customer experience has become a key priority in marketing research and practice. Researchers largely recognize that the customer experience emerges as responses to stimuli along a customer journey. Extant research often anchors the customer journey to an offering, losing sight of a customer’s goals. This firm-centric perspective hampers the understanding of customer experience, since in practice customers actively integrate resources from multiple firms, organizations, and social actors in pursuit of their goals. The purpose of this dissertation is to develop a customer-centric perspective of customer experience. Such a perspective focuses on customers’ goals and seeks to understand customer experience as it emerges in a customer’s lifeworld.
This dissertation comprises three articles. Article I examines the extant customer experience research to develop a theoretical foundation for the customer-centric perspective. Based on a systematic literature review of 136 articles, the study identifies eight literature fields in customer experience research: services marketing, consumer research, retailing, service-dominant logic, service design, online marketing, branding, and experiential marketing. Applying a metatheoretical analysis, the study divides extant literature into two research traditions that see customer experience as either responses to (1) managerial stimuli or (2) consumption processes. Through integrating compatible elements between these two research traditions, the paper develops four fundamental premises that define what customer experience is, the stimuli that affect it, its key contingencies, and the role of firms and organizations in its management.
Article II offers suggestions on how customer experience can be empirically studied through a customer-centric perspective. Using selected literature, the study identifies the methodological requirements for the study of customer experience, namely: first-hand description of experience, description of relevant actors and institutions in a customer’s ecosystem, and capturing the processual nature of the journey. The article also offers specific guidelines for three data collection methods that fulfill those methodological requirements: phenomenological interviews, event-based approaches, and diary method.
Article III conceptualizes the customer journey through a goal-oriented view to generate a customer-centric perspective of customer experience. A hermeneutic-phenomenological field study is conducted to examine recovering alcoholics’ journey toward a sober life. The findings reveal three essential journey processes: recognizing the problem and setting the goals, changing habits and behaviors, and overcoming obstacles and temptations. Interpreting the findings with the self-regulation model of behavior, the study develops a goal-oriented view of customer journey, depicted as a hierarchical structure with three levels: consumer journey, customer journey, and touchpoints. The findings show the role of customer experience as a driver of behavior along this journey.
This dissertation creates new knowledge of the concept of customer experience in marketing. It integrates extant literature, thus solving theoretical conflicts in this fragmented research area; it provides methodological insights on the empirical inquiry of customer experience, specifying its requirements; and it puts forward a goal-oriented conceptualization of the customer journey that supports the development of a customer-centric perspective of customer experience. The study also produces important implications for marketing practitioners and public actors who wish to benefit from the customer-centric perspective of customer experience.
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... Due to its initial conception within experiential marketing and service design, Customer Experience has historically been dominantly firm-centric, viewing the Customer Experience only in the context and limits of their offering (product purchase or service encounter) [10,11]. The general consensus is that these stimuli (direct or indirect interactions) are found as part of the Customer Journey as touchpoints [10,12]. Herein lies one of the larger gaps within the field, as Customer Experience research has been predominately focused on Customer Journeys: creating methods and approaches for managers to influence and improve the journey considering the touchpoints that are controlled by the organization [10,[13][14][15][16]. ...
... The same applies to research related to Customer Experience driven innovation-literature within the marketing domain has been predominately focused on innovation activities and capabilities from the organization's perspective, aimed at improving touchpoints and interactions within the control of the organization-its products and services (mainly under the topic of service innovation) [16]. Researchers have pointed out this gap by proposing further research to focus on the experience from the customer's perspective [12,17,18], and some have already tried to address it by proposing external touchpoints as part of the Customer Journey [10,[19][20][21]. However, this approach still limits the scope to look at the journey from a firm's perspective, simply introducing additional touchpoints that are outside of the organization's control (e.g., looking up reviews for a product before making a purchase), ignoring the underlying cause for why a customer decided to partake or start the journey itself. ...
... Grounded theory and open coding were used to analyze and interpret the interview results, and to establish and understand the impact of the various Customer Experience elements to other elements. The findings were then used to create a theoretical model-a hierarchical view on Customer, Consumer Journeys and touchpoints and higher-to-lower order goals, building on Becker's hierarchical view on Customer Journeys [12]. ...
Customer and Consumer Journeys, touchpoints and Consumer Goals have been widely discussed among Customer Experience theorists and practitioners, establishing that a hierarchical relationship between those exist. Customer Experience driven innovation evaluates opportunities mainly within touchpoints in Customer Journeys. However, there is still a gap in understanding how exactly those elements are interlinked and impact each other. This research article aims to create this understanding by answering three research questions: “To what extent, and how do Customer Journeys impact Consumer Journeys and vice versa?” and “Are touchpoints (including other actors) a sub-set of Consumer or Customer Journeys?” and “Where in the hierarchy should Customer Experience driven innovation opportunities be identified?”. Phenomenological interviews with participants of the Cambridge Venture Camp 2021, organized as part of the ERASMUS+ programme of the European Union within Strategic Partnerships for Higher Education were chosen for the research methodology. Grounded theory and open coding were used to interpret the collected data. In this article, we demonstrate how Consumer Journeys impact Customer Journeys, and that Customer Journeys do not impact other journeys directly, but rather by adjusting the higher-order goals of the Consumer through the response to the stimuli in the touchpoints. A theoretical model is proposed that highlights the interconnectivity of the different experience elements, and how to interpret Customer Experience driven innovation within the hierarchy.
... 최근 고객경험 관련 연구는 고객의 서비스 프로세스와 생활세계(lifeworld)에 내재 되어 있음이 강조되고 있다 (Becker, 2020). 서비스 프로세스 관점은 서비스 프로세스 상에서 제공자 관점의 효율성과 효과성뿐만 아니라 고객경험을 긍정적으로 이끌기 위 한 종합적인 관점을 의미한다 (Voorhees et al., 2017;황혜미와 이돈희, 2021 (Habermas, 1981, p.209 (Lemon and Verhoef, 2016;Voorhees et al., 2017). ...
The purpose of this study is to use relevant cases to develop an integrated support service model for continuous customer value creation. An integrated support service model framework and specific activities were suggested in this study. This model was developed as a three-step process: activities before the point of sale (before service provision, pre-sale), during the point of sale (during service provision, on-sale), and after the point of sale (after service provision, post-sale). The following processes are suggested, each of which has sub-steps. Pre-sale activities include service warranties. On-sale activities are broken into service failure prevention and recovery management, customer
experience management, and personalized service management activities.
Post-sale activities include service management after the point of sale. In particular, service failure prevention and recovery management are necessary for all three steps. According to the findings of this study, the proposed model that categorizes the services needed from before to after sales by procedures and
integrating components would be applied in the service sectors.
Paper available at: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11747-019-00718-x
Customer experience is a key marketing concept, yet the growing number of studies focused on this topic has led to considerable fragmentation and theoretical confusion. To move the field forward, this article develops a set of fundamental premises that reconcile contradictions in research on customer experience and provide integrative guideposts for future research. A systematic review of 136 articles identifies eight literature fields that address customer experience. The article then compares the phenomena and metatheoretical assumptions prevalent in each field to establish a dual classification of research traditions that study customer experience as responses to either (1) managerial stimuli or (2) consumption processes. By analyzing the compatibility of these research traditions through a metatheoretical lens, this investigation derives four fundamental premises of customer experience that are generalizable across settings and contexts. These premises advance the conceptual development of customer experience by defining its core conceptual domain and providing guidelines for further research.
Contextualized in postpurchase consumption in business-to-business settings, the authors contribute to customer experience (CX) management theory and practice in three important ways. First, by offering a novel CX conceptual framework that integrates prior CX research to better understand, manage, and improve CXs—comprised of value creation elements (resources, activities, context, interactions, and customer role), cognitive responses, and discrete emotions at touchpoints across the customer journey. Second, by demonstrating the usefulness of a longitudinal CX analytic based on the conceptual framework that combines quantitative and qualitative measures. Third, by providing a step-by-step guide for implementing the text mining approach in practice, thereby showing that CX analytics that apply big data techniques to the CX can offer significant insights that matter. The authors highlight six key insights practitioners need in order to manage their customers’ journey, through (1) taking a customer perspective, (2) identifying root causes, (3) uncovering at-risk segments, (4) capturing customers’ emotional and cognitive responses, (5) spotting and preventing decreasing sales, and (6) prioritizing actions to improve CX. The article concludes with directions for future research.
This study explores how reflexivity contributes to the continuation of value creation for consumers throughout consumption journeys. Reflexivity is awareness of the self within the world. Our study establishes a framework for studying consumption journeys centered on progressive engagement with a practice—in this case surfing—over time. We discover that reflexivity manifests in consumption journeys in an iterative, recursive manner—i.e., recursive reflexivity—tacking between identity (mis)alignment (with dominant institutions) and reflexive outcomes, such as imitating, improving, adapting and reconciling. Our findings reveal that recursive reflexivity contributes to the continuation of value creation in consumption journeys by fostering practice continuity—i.e., immersion, adaptation, innovation and/or dissolution of a practice—which provides opportunities for enhanced consumption experiences and supports the evolution of identity projects. These findings deepen the understanding of how practices, identity, and institutions contribute to value creation. Implications from these findings suggest that firms should pay close attention to recursive reflexivity and practice continuity to cultivate value creation with consumers by (a) providing opportunities for enhanced consumption experiences, (b) aligning or misaligning brand identity with dominant institutions, and (c) sparking imagining, identity evolution, and practice innovation.
Recently, practitioners have begun appraising an effective customer journey design (CJD) as an important source of customer value in increasingly complex and digitalized consumer markets. Research, however, has neither investigated what constitutes the effectiveness of CJD from a consumer perspective nor empirically tested how it affects important variables of consumer behavior. The authors define an effective CJD as the extent to which consumers perceive multiple brand-owned touchpoints as designed in a thematically cohesive, consistent, and context-sensitive way. Analyzing consumer data from studies in two countries (4814 consumers in total), they provide evidence of the positive influence of an effective CJD on customer loyalty through brand attitude—over and above the effects of brand experience. Importantly, an effective CJD more strongly influences utilitarian brand attitudes, while brand experience more strongly affects hedonic brand attitudes. These underlying mechanisms are also prevalent when testing for the contingency factors services versus goods, perceived switching costs, and brand involvement.
The author describes and illustrates a hermeneutically grounded interpretive framework for deriving marketing-relevant insights from the “texts” of consumer stories and gives an overview of the philosophical and theoretical foundations of this approach. Next, the author describes a hermeneutic framework for interpreting the stories consumers tell about their experiences of products, services, brand images, and shopping. An illustrative analysis demonstrates how this framework can be applied to generate three levels of interpretation: (1) discerning the key patterns of meanings expressed by a given consumer in the texts of his or her consumption stories, (2) identifying key patterns of meaning that emerge across the consumption stories expressed by different consumers, and (3) deriving broader conceptual and managerial implications from the analysis of consumer narratives. This hermeneutic approach is compared and contrasted to the means—end chains laddering framework, the “voice of the customer” approach to identifying consumer needs, and market-oriented ethnography. The author concludes with a discussion that highlights the types of marketing insights that can result from a hermeneutic interpretation of consumers’ consumption stories and then addresses the roles creativity and expertise play in this research orientation.
Goals play an essential role in the purposive behavior of consumers, but scholars only recently have begun to examine the motivation for goals, their selection and modification, and their pursuit and attainment. One purpose of this article is to outline a conceptual framework for thinking about how goals emerge, influence decision making, and guide consumer choice and action. Another purpose is to integrate classic ideas proposed by consumer researchers with emerging concepts and models proposed by cognitive psychologists, social psychologists, and other social scientists. Finally, the authors’ aim is to present several new ideas on goal setting and goal striving and point out how they can enrich the study and practice of consumer behavior.
The authors address the role of marketing in hypermedia computer-mediated environments (CMEs). Their approach considers hypermedia CMEs to be large-scale (i.e., national or global) networked environments, of which the World Wide Web on the Internet is the first and current global implementation. They introduce marketers to this revolutionary new medium, propose a structural model of consumer navigation behavior in a CME that incorporates the notion of flow, and examine a series of research issues and marketing implications that follow from the model.
This article introduces the fresh start mindset, defined as a belief that people can make a new start, get a new beginning, and chart a new course in life, regardless of their past or present circumstances. With historical roots in American culture and neoliberalism, and with contemporary links to liquid modernity and global consumer culture, this mindset structures reasoning, experience, and everyday language , and guides behavior across self-and other-transformative consumption domains. We develop a six-item scale (FSM) to measure the fresh start mindset and situate it within a broader nomological network, including growth mindset, personal capacity for change, optimism, future temporal focus, internal locus of control , self-efficacy, perseverance, resilience, and consumer variety seeking. Individuals with a stronger (vs. weaker) fresh start mindset invest in transformative change through changing their circumstances, including their own consumption choices (e.g., buying a new pair of sunglasses and getting a new self); they also are more supportive of transformative programs that assist those who are challenged to get a fresh start (i.e., disadvantaged youth, at-risk teens, veterans, and tax-burdened adults). Our work significantly contributes to transformative consumer research with attention to self-activities and programs for vulnerable populations that enable new beginnings.