Building A High Customer Experience Management Organization: Towards Customer-Centricity

Lamin B Ceesay

doi:10.7176/jmcr/71-02

Abstract

The dynamics involving market competition and the challenges of dealing with empowered customers, means that creating and delivering relevant customer experience (CX) of service, is as important as creating product or services. Several studies have treated customer experience as though a front-desk, sales-point affair with the customer in the retailing environment, negating the critical role of organization-wide efforts in the overall customer experience management sequence. This review, however, adopts customer-centricity, as a theoretical lens to underscore the [re]configuration of organizational-level factors that are critical to adopting a high customer-experienced centred organization. Based on the review, we highlight conditions for adopting high customer experience management organization: (1) developing an integrated CX strategy, (2) CX-based knowledge management, (3) organizational re-design that supports CX-management, (4) top management commitment, (5) integrated CX IT systems, and (6) CX-oriented HR policies. These practices are only necessary conditions, but not sufficient, for creating, delivering, relevant and sustainable customer experience. However, more robust empirical studies are needed to advance the application of organization-wide customer experience management, which vary across industry, products/services, and sector. Keywords: customer experience; customer-centricity; customer experience design; and integrated customer experience strategy. DOI: 10.7176/JMCR/71-02 Publication date: September 30 th 2020

Highlights

The customer experience (CX) as an emerging concept in Marketing, is gaining popularity in research (e.g. Schmitt and Rogers, 2008; Grewal et al, 2009; Schmitt, 2009; Meyer and Schwager, 2007) and in practice, in the retails sector
Several studies reviewed CX based on customer-firm dyads, relating to consumer brand experience, few researchers argue that CX extends far beyond the customer-firm context which is critical to customer overall experience (e.g. Lemon and Verhoef, 2016; Pine and Gilmore, 1998)
Our goal is to address the challenges of adopting CX management by organizations as they look towards a more customer-centricity in today’s highly competitive and empowered customers

Summary

Introduction

The customer experience (CX) as an emerging concept in Marketing, is gaining popularity in research (e.g. Schmitt and Rogers, 2008; Grewal et al, 2009; Schmitt, 2009; Meyer and Schwager, 2007) and in practice, in the retails sector. Schmitt and Rogers (2008), describe customer experience as an all-inclusive embodiment of a customer, how he/she behaves, thinks, feels, acts, socializes and senses. Aligning an organization towards a more customer-centricity is because of the important role of customer satisfaction in organizational performance (Homburg, et al, 2000) and firm’s longterm sustainability (Schmitt and Rogers, 2008). This means firms must invest in customer value-seeking behaviour, through effective organizational design, to enhance long-term satisfaction and loyalty

Objectives

Discussion

Conclusion