Towards a Better Measure of Customer Experience

TLDR

Customer experience is increasingly prioritized in market research, replacing quality as the competitive battleground, yet it is generated through extended, multi‑channel interactions that combine functional and emotional cues, a process distinct from traditional service‑quality models focused on the provider. The study questions the use of satisfaction and NPS to assess customer experience, arguing for a more appropriate metric. The authors introduce the customer experience quality (EXQ) scale and extend prior work by comparing its predictive power to that of customer satisfaction. Practitioner surveys show most firms rely on satisfaction or NPS, but the study finds that EXQ better explains and predicts loyalty and recommendations than satisfaction.

Abstract

Defining and improving customer experience is a growing priority for market research because experience is replacing quality as the competitive battleground for marketing. Service quality is an outgrowth of the total quality management (TQM) movement of the 1980s and suffers from that movement's focus on the provider rather than the value derived by customers. Researchers today state that customer experience is generated through a longer process of company–customer interaction across multiple channels, generated through both functional and emotional clues. Our research with practitioners indicates that most firms use customer satisfaction, or its derivative the Net Promoter Score, to assess their customers' experiences. We question this practice based on the conceptual gap between these measures and the customer experience. In IJMR 53, 6 (2011), we introduce a new measure appropriate for the modern conceptualisation of customer experience: the customer experience quality (EXQ) scale. In this article we extend that work and compare EXQ's predictive power with that of customer satisfaction. We establish that EXQ better explains and predicts both, loyalty and recommendations, than customer satisfaction.