Digital Marketing and Metrics | Articles
Lemon & Verhoef (2016): Understanding Customer Experience Throughout the Customer
Journey
- Understanding customer experience and the customer journey over time is critical for firms.
Customers now interact with firms through myriad touch points in multiple channels and media,
and customer experiences are more social in nature. These changes require fi rms to integrate
multiple business functions, and even external partners, in creating and delivering positive
customer experiences.
- This article aim to develop a stronger understanding of customer experience and the customer
journey in this era of increasingly complex customer behavior. They attempt to bring together
what is currently known about customer experience, customer journeys, and customer experience
management.
- The increasing focus on customer experience arises because customers now interact with fi rms
through myriad touch points in multiple channels and media, resulting in more complex
customer journeys. Firms are confronted with accelerating media and channel fragmentation, and
omnichannel management has become the new norm.
- Customer experience is known to have a holistic nature, incorporating the customer's cognitive,
emotional, sensory, social, and spiritual responses to all interactions with a firm.
- Recently, customer experience has been defined as encompassing every aspect of a company’s
offering—the quality of customer care, of course, but also advertising, packaging, product and
service features, ease of use, and reliability. It is the internal and subjective response customers
have to any direct or indirect contact with a company.
- Multiple definitions of customer experience exist in the literature. This article focuses on the
major accepted definitions:
• Schmitt (1999) takes a multidimensional view and identifies five types of experiences: sensory
(sense), affective (feel), cognitive (think), physical (act), and social-identity (relate) experiences.
• Verhoef et al. (2009) define customer experience in a retailing context as a multidimensional
construct and specifically state that the customer experience construct is holistic in nature and
involves the customer’ s cognitive, affective, emotional, social, and physical responses to the
retailer.
• Brakus et al. (2009) conceptualize brand experience as subjective, internal consumer responses
(sensations, feelings, and cognitions) and behavioral responses evoked by brand-related stimuli
that are part of a brand’s design. They show that brand experience consists of four separate,
though related, dimensions: sensory, affective, intellectual, and behavioral.
• Grewal (2009) suggest that in a retailing context, customer experiences can be categorized
along the lines of the retail mix.
• De Keyser et al. (2015) describe customer experience as “ comprised of the cognitive,
emotional, physical, sensorial, spiritual, and social elements that mark the customer’ s direct or
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, indirect interaction with (an)other market actor(s)”— in essence, the raw data contained in all
direct or indirect interactions that then come together as an overall experience.
- Hence, customer experience is a multidimensional construct focusing on a customer’ s cognitive,
emotional, behavioral, sensorial, and social responses to a firm’ s offerings during the customer’ s
entire purchase journey.
- The customer purchase journey is the process a customer goes through, across all stages and
touch points, that makes up the customer experience.
- It is helpful to understand how customer experience is related to more focused constructs, such
as customer satisfaction and service quality. Customer satisfaction could be one of the
components of customer experience, focusing on the customer’ s cognitive evaluation of the
experience. One could even argue that customer experience is broadening the concept of
customer satisfaction, leading to a richer view.
- Constructs in relationship marketing, such as trust and commitment, are also related to customer
experience and may influence a customer’ s follow-on experiences. Commitment, as a measure of
a customer’ s connection with a company, would typically be a consequence of customer
experience.
- Customer engagement focuses on the extent to which the customer reaches out to and initiates
contact with the firm, whether attitudinally or behaviorally. As such, engagement constitutes
touch points along the customer journey and results in cognitive, emotional, behavioral,
sensorial, and social responses on the part of the customer, customer engagement becomes a part
of the overall customer experience and, in its specific manifestations, constitutes specific touch
points along the customer journey.
- The total customer experience is a dynamic process. The customer experience process flows
from pre-purchase (including search) to purchase to post-purchase; it is iterative and dynamic.
In each stage, customers experience touch points, only some of which are under the firm’ s
control.
- The four categories of customer experience touch points:
1. Brand-Owned: any bit of interaction or communication made between a brand and its
customers. Everything of the marketing mix.
2. Partner-Owned: cooperation's between the company and one of the partners, e.g. marketing
agency, distribution partners etc., which means it is depending on the relationship you have with
the given partner.
3. Customer-Owned: where customers interact with your brand, product, service, etc.
Developing an understanding of each touchpoint means that you can design better user and
better customer experiences.
4. Social/External/Independent: customers are surrounded by external touch points (e.g., other
customers, peer influences, independent information sources, environments) that may influence
the process. Peers may exert influence, solicited or unsolicited, in all three stages of the
experience.
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,- Process Model for Customer Journey and Experience:
- The dynamics and externalities of the customer experience suggests the following:
• The customer’s dynamic external environment can have a significant influence on customer
experience.
• Extreme crises can have a strong, negative, and enduring effect on the customer experience.
• The economic situation (i.e., recession, expansion) influences the customer experience across
firms, and the drivers of customer experience may depend on the economic situation.
- A service blueprint is a diagram that visualizes the relationships between different service
components — people, props (physical or digital evidence), and processes — that are directly
tied to touch points in a specific customer journey. The service blueprinting literature suggests:
• Service blueprinting can provide a solid starting point for customer journey mapping.
• Customer journey analysis should understand and map the journey from the customer
perspective and, therefore, requires customer input.
- The role of channels in the customer journey:
• Channels differ in benefits and costs, often making one channel more useful for a specific stage
in the purchase funnel than other channels. These differences are, however, shrinking due to
technological developments and diffusion of new channels.
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, • Customers differ in their preference and usage of channels across different purchase phases, and
specific multichannel segments can be identified that differ in terms of consumer characteristics.
• Channel choices in the purchase funnel are affected by one another because of lock-in effects,
channel inertia, and cross-channel synergies.
- Regarding the multidevice mobile journey, research has suggested the following:
• Mobile device channels interact and may interfere with existing channels.
• Mobile device channels offer new location-based, time sensitive opportunities to create firm-
initiated touch points.
• Mobile channels appear to be better suited for search than for purchase.
• Mobile devices’ direct-touch interface appears to significantly influence the customer journey.
- While no strong customer experience scales have been developed, Brakus et al. (2009) develop a
brand experience scale that measures four aspects of the customer brand experience—sensory,
affective, intellectual, and behavioral—identifying relationships between brand experience and
brand personality, satisfaction, and loyalty.
- Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a metric for assessing customer loyalty for a company's brand,
products or services. Many companies use NPS as part of their customer relationship
management (CRM) strategy because the metric is easy to calculate.
NPS = % Promoters - % Detractors
- Customer Effort Score (CES) is a type of customer satisfaction metric that measures the ease of
an experience with a company by asking customers, on a five-point scale of "Very Difficult" to
"Very Easy," how much effort was required on the part of the customer to use the product or
service to evaluate how likely they are to continue using and paying for it.
- Customer experience measurement shows that:
• There is not yet agreement on robust measurement approaches to evaluate all aspects of
customer experience across the customer journey; long-tested approaches, such as SERVQUAL,
may offer a good starting point.
• Customer satisfaction and NPS perform equally well in predicting firm performance and
customer behavior, although the predictive performance differs between specific contexts.
• Transformations of metrics to account for potential nonlinear effects due to notions such as
customer delight are useful.
• Customer feedback metrics focusing on a specific domain of the customer experience (e.g.,
Customer Effort Score) are not strong in predicting future performance.
• Multiple customer feedback metrics predict customer behavior better than a single metric.
- Measuring the effects of customer touch points reveals that:
• When moving through the customer journey to purchase, customers use and are exposed to
multiple touch points that each have direct and more indirect effects on purchase and other
customer behaviors.
• Although it is a complex and difficult endeavor, it is important to identify critical touch points
(“moments of truth”) throughout the customer journey that have the most significant influence on
key customer outcomes.
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