Understanding Fluency and Friction in Customer Experience Management

Abstract

Customer experience management is a relatively new research field. Although past literature has studied certain aspects and elements of customer experience, major questions are still unanswered, including how to integrate touch-points across the customer journey and how to measure customer experience in a way that takes its multidimensional nature into consideration. This chapter attempts to provide a framework to study how customers perceive touch-points as a holistic experience and proposes an integrated approach to measuring the experience of challenges that result in what we call “friction.” The framework is based on the concept of “fluency” from the engineering and omni-channel literature and suggests survey items which can be used for future empirical studies. Insights from this research can be used by various types of organizations to better identify problems in the customer experience in regard to the process and dynamics of touch-points through time and across channels/platforms, thereby enhancing value for customers and businesses.