Managing and measuring customer experience: a literature review

Abstract

Purpose - Nowadays, customers expect from the brands to build customized and long term relationships with them. Hence, it has become evident that managerial approaches like Customer Relationship Management are important, but not sufficient to understand and manage the relationships with customers. It has been well recognized that companies need something more than keeping, analyzing the data on customer behavior and determine strategies accordingly. A new concept and deeper approach to understand and manage the whole process through which the customer get in touch with the company, namely Customer Experience Management (CEM) is coined lately. Although researchers have been interested in studying the topic for almost twenty years, most of the studies in the literature are conceptual in nature and empirical studies are scarce. T he purpose of this study is to provide the main directions and insights for the future studies based on the previous studies discussing and measuring customer experience as a concept. Methodology - Through a literature review, customer experience and customer experience management concepts are discussed and the empirical approaches to measure the customer experience are examined. Findings- Although there is a significant number of empirical studies on the topic in the marketing literature, a commonly accepted scale measuring the customer experience has not been developed yet in the literature. However, the literature highlights the dimensions and other attributes of the measurement that need to be considered in developing a scale. Conclusion - The need for development of a valid and reliable scale for measuring customer experience has become evident with the developing technology affecting different aspects of the customer experiences. Since the importance of experiential marketing has been increasing for the Y and Z generations, the measurement of customer experience for these generations has been more important.