Identification and ranking the significant factors influencing customer experience for shopping malls in the Indian context

Abstract

Today the market is highly competitive and saturated with multiple products, to survive and sustain in such an environment customer experience (CE) plays a vital role. Globally, marketers and academicians are focusing on understanding and creating pleasant CE. For marketing managers understanding the elements essential to create experience will help in better management and creation of CE. The present research identifies and assess the critical success factors affecting CE for shopping malls and prioritises to determine which is more significant and causative to achieve promising CE. The study is based on the existing literature on 'customer experience' and results obtained from brainstorming sessions with academicians and retail industry experts. It scrutinises the critical success factors affecting CE which are finally confirmed in the context of shopping malls. With the analytical hierarchy process, 11 main factors and 28 subfactors are prioritised which are responsible for creating unique and memorable CE. The findings suggest that the brand managers must ameliorate these factors according to their weights, in order to attain superior CE and sustainable competitive advantage.