The customer experience: a road‐map for improvement

Abstract

Structured abstractPurpose: This paper attempts to respond to the call to help organisations systematically engineer their customer experiences. Its objective is to investigate how organisations actually go about designing and improving their customer experiences.Design/methodology/approach: Four organisations were chosen for this exploratory study; one business-to-business company, one business-to-consumer company, one utility and one public sector organisation. This longitudinal study over a period of four years collected data from participant observation, discussions, internal reports and from secondary data.Findings: Despite the differences between the four organisations they appear to have taken, independently, the same approach to bring about improvements to their customer experiences. This paper proposes a ten stage "road map" to improvement which develops the existing models. Contribution:The study makes four theoretical contributions including a definition of a customer experience and its difference to a service, it provides some empirical support for the existing stage models which it has develops and extends into a ten stage model. It has also identified the "triple bottom line" as the outcome of customer experience design not simply an improved experience. Practical implications:This study identifies the critical importance of mindset change in the design of customer experience improvement programmes and the ways in which customers can be directly engaged in the design and improvement process. Importantly it provides a road map which organisations can use as a base for improving their customer experiences. It also suggests that it is useful to have clear objectives in three areas: customer, staff and cost efficiency and use them to assess the benefits of improving the customer experience. Originality/value:The study organises the current literature on the customer experience, distinguishes between "service" and "experience", and provides a research-based road map for improving the customer experience. Research limitations:Main limitations were that the in-depth, longitudinal study covered just four organisations and from a mix of sectors. Further work is needed to further test the findings in more organisations. Research PaperAccepted for publication in Managing Service Quality, 2011

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