The Customer Experience Framework as Baseline for Strategy and Implementation in Services Marketing

TLDR

Researchers in service marketing have examined customer satisfaction through the lens of the service encounter, yet a comprehensive guide for marketers to understand the customer’s perspective remains lacking. The authors propose a new customer experience framework (CEF) that centers on the customer’s journey through the service encounter. The CEF is structured around five interacting layers—customer values, experiential marketing strategy, experience stages, accumulated experience, and behavior change—providing a holistic view of the customer journey. The authors claim the CEF can serve as both a tool for creating experiences and for analyzing consumer experiences after the encounter.

Abstract

Researchers in service marketing have recently considered customer satisfaction from the viewpoint of what and how they experienced the service encounter resulting in the concept of customer experience management. Whilst several works have been developed in this area, there is still much that can be done to provide a comprehensive guide for marketers in understanding the service encounter from the point of view of customers. Building on the work of Verhoef et al's article in the Journal of Retailing (2009) and other works in the field, we propose a new customer experience framework (CEF) that focuses more centrally on the journey of the customer in experiencing the service. Our framework consists of five interacting layers: (1) Customer values, needs and wants; (2) Experiential Marketing Strategy; (3) Customer Experience Stages; (4) Accumulated Customer Experience (5) Customer Behavior Change. This differs from Verhoef et al's framework, which primarily focuses on looking at designing the optimal consumer experience from the viewpoint of the provider. We propose that the CEF will be useful both as a tool for experience creation and to analyze consumer experiences post-encounter.