Exploring the Relationship between Social Environment and Customer Experience

Abstract

The emergence of “experience” as another forms of business offerings (Pine and Gilmore, 1999) and the failure of implementing customer relationship management to create the expected levels of value for customers and profitability for organizations (Palmer, 2010; Barnes, 2002) have prompted the practitioners and academic scholars to explore the successor of customer relationship management, which is known as customer experience. Pine and Gilmore (1999) asserted that companies need to create memorable experiences to each customer for the purpose of generating greater economic value in the experience-based economy, instead of simply making goods and delivering services to the customers (Kim, Cha, Knutson and Beck, 2011). For the purpose of creating differentiated and memorable customer experience, this research paper would like to evaluate the direct and indirect relationship between social environment and customer experience (including sensory experience, emotional experience and social experience). A total of 330 respondents participate in this research. The findings revealed thatsocial environment is related to the sensory experience and emotional experience respectively.Furthermore, the research findings also concluded the interactive relationships between the dimensions of the customer experience: (1) the sensory experience is positively related to the emotional experience; (2) the emotional experience is positively related to the social experience; and (3) the sensory experience is positively related to the social experience.