A customer experience lens for higher education in India using journey mapping and experience quality

Abstract

ABSTRACT Higher education has witnessed unprecedented changes in the last two decades – a highly competitive global market, varying nature of work, industry expectations, learning preferences, advancement in technology, and to top it all a pandemic. To sustain and remain competitive Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) have shown an increased interest in sophisticated marketing practices, a heightened focus on building brands, creating brand experiences, and perfecting service quality. Around the same time period, services marketing as a field advanced with the works of Vargo and Lusch (2004, “Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for Marketing.” Journal of Marketing 68 (1): 1–17) on service-dominant-logic, and Verhoef et al (2009, Customer Experience Creation: Determinants, Dynamics and Management Strategies.” Journal of Retailing 85 (1): 31–41) on customer experience (CX) catapulting the field into directions of value co-creation, experience, and excellence. There have been, however very limited attempts to view HEIs from a service or experience lens. From a research perspective, this gap can be attributed to silos in research and deficient cross-functional literature. Service research views services either specific to a business sector (banking, retail, hospitality, etc.) or generically, while education literature tends to focus on the curriculum, teaching, and learning aspects of higher education ignoring the business, service, and experience aspects. Institutions also continue to debate about students as customers, or have a narrow focus on programs and deliverables and remain agnostic about the end-to-end experience. This work attempts to provide insights to business schools using frameworks and methods applied in services and customer experience research, treating business education as a complex service and participants in executive education as co-creators of value.