EXQ: a multiple-item scale for assessing service experience - one of the most downloaded papers in 2012

Thank you for your support in making this happen, and please download a free copy of our paper, if you haven't done so already.

 

Celebrating the impact you made

As a Journal of Service Management (JOSM) author from the past four years, we’d like to thank you for contributing to the ongoing success of the journal. The latest Journal Citation Report release saw JOSM receive an Impact Factor of 1.218. See below to discover if you were one of the authors who made the biggest impact. Authors making an impact The following papers received the highest number of citations which contributed to Journal of Service Management’s Impact Factor success. Daniel Kindström and Christian Kowalkowski Development of industrial service offerings: a process framework Henning Droege, Dagmar Hildebrand and Miguel A. Heras Forcada Innovation in services: present findings, and future pathways Anna Fyrberg and Rein Jüriado What about interaction?: Networks and brands as integrators within service-dominant logic Stefan Michel, David Bowen and Robert Johnston Why service recovery fails: Tensions among customer, employee, and process perspectives Heiko Gebauer, Thomas Fischer and Elgar Fleisch Exploring the interrelationship among patterns of service strategy changes and organizational design elements The 2012 research your colleagues are reading The following papers, published this year, are capturing the attention of you and your colleagues as evidenced by high download statistics. Sejin Ha and Leslie Stoel Online apparel retailing: roles of e-shopping quality and experiential e-shopping motives Cheng Wang, Jennifer Harris and Paul G. Patterson Customer choice of self-service technology: the roles of situational influences and past experience Young Ha and Hyunjoo Im Role of web site design quality in satisfaction and word of mouth generation Philipp “Phil” Klaus and Stan Maklan EXQ: a multiple-item scale for assessing service experience Heiko Gebauer, Guang-Jie Ren, Aku Valtakoski and Javier Reynoso Service-driven manufacturing: Provision, evolution and financial impact of services in industrial firms

Impact Factor: 1.218     Free Resources How to... increase online readership of your article     How to... disseminate your work

Exploring and Defining the Online Customer Experience (OCSE) and its influence on consumer behavior

New insights on how to manage the Online Customer Experience successfully - download your complimentary version here. 

The concept of online customer service experience (OCSE) has recently received great interest from academia and businesses alike. Despite the belief that providing superb online experiences will influence customers’ online buying behavior, most of the research focuses solely on the controllable factors of the online experience. Based on empirical findings, my study develops an Online Customer Experience framework (OCSE). OCSE extends and expands existing research on the influence of the online customer service experience on customer behavior. In particular, the study identifies that the individual importance of the OCSE factors differ depending on which stage of the experience, namely prior to, during, or after the transaction the customer is in. Moreover, the study reveals the presence of one previously unexplored key component of the online customer service experience: social presence. 

This, of course, has significant implications for how to manage customers online in order to increase loyalty, purchasing behavior, positive recommendations and an increase in share-of-category/share of wallet. Implications on how companies can take advantage of this opportunities are knowledge are discussed in detail.

Read about all the implications in the free version of the article, which is now available for download HERE. 

We encourage you to leave your comments and get in touch with us and are looking forward to your feedback.

Towards a Better Measure of Customer Experience - New evidence for the explanatory and predictive power of EXQ

"Based on their 2011 article Klaus and Maklan deliver more evidence on not only how to measure the customer experience, but the superior predictive power of their EXQ Scale in comparison to service quality and customer satisfaction."

If you are curious about the implementation of these findings for your Customer Experience Management Strategies and Practices we offer you a free version of our article, which is now available for download HERE.

We encourage you to leave your comments and get in touch with us and are looking forward to your feedback. 

Abstract:

Defining and improving customer experience is a growing priority for market research because experience is replacing quality as the competitive battleground for marketing. Service quality, we argue, is an outgrowth of the Total Quality Management movement of the 1980s and suffers from that movement’s focus on the provider rather than the value derived by customers. The most popular measure of service quality – SERVQUAL – assesses the functional delivery of service during a single episode. This conceptualization allows service to be improved along traditional quality management principles. The increasingly settled view of researchers is that customer experience is generated through a longer process of company-customer interaction across multiple channels and is generated through both functional and emotional clues. Research with practitioners indicates that most firms use customer satisfaction, or its derivative Net Promoter Score, to assess their customers’ experiences. We question this practice based on the conceptual gap between these measures and the customer experience. In the IJMR October 2011, we proposed the principles of a new measure appropriate for the modern conceptualization of customer experience: the Customer Experience Quality (EXQ) scale. In this article we extend that work to four service contexts to support a claim of generalizability better and compare its predictive power with that of customer satisfaction. We propose that EXQ better explains behavioral intention and recommendation than customer satisfaction. 

Customer Experience: Are We Measuring the Right Things? Now available free online

Our recent article challenging market researchers and customer experience managers in the way they are measuring, and subsequently managing the customer experience received a vast amount of feedback and comments from the market research industry, Customer Experience managers and academics.


In order for to see what triggered all these reactions we now a pre-reviewed FREE version of our article online. You can download the article by CLICKING HERE.

We are looking forward to your comments.


Please support our publisher by downloading the peer-reviewed PDF version HERE.

Bridging The Gap For Destination Extreme Sports - A Model of Sports Tourism Customer Experience

In our recent Journal of Marketing Management paper we explore the crucial influence of customer experience on consumer behavior in the tourism, and in particular, sports tourism industry. The implications for the tourism sector are significant and highlighting why (a) current strategies are failing, and (b) how to design strategies leading to an increase in customers, repeat, and regular customers. Our study also highlights that 1st time, repeat, and regular customers have different needs. Subsequently, the marketing efforts for all three segments need to be tailored accordingly.

Gain free access to our pre-publication version of our study BY CLICKING HERE

Support our publisher by downloading the final version of the article from our publisher's website.

Abstract:

This longitudinal study proposes a conceptual model of sports tourism customer experience in the context of a mountain-biking extreme sport camp. Customer experience is conceptualized as a three-dimensional framework consisting of five dimensions: hedonic pleasure, personal progression, social interaction, efficiency and surreal feeling. Using the means-end approach in 89 semi-structured interviews with clients of a mountain-biking camp, conducted over three years, the authors identified hedonic pleasure and personal progression as the two core experiences valued by customers. The core experience generates surreal feelings, incomparable and memorable evaluations of the overall experience. Social interaction facilitates the core experience, while efficiency enables the core experience. Existing marketing management frameworks lack empirical investigation and social science frameworks fail to take a holistic view; our framework bridges the gap between social science and marketing literatures by exploring, testing and incorporating both streams empirically. Implications for practitioners’ customer insight processes and future research directions are discussed.

Keywords:

Sports tourism, Sports tourist experiences, Consumption experiences, Experiential marketing, Customer Experience, hedonic experiences

Customer experience measurement: thinking beyond service

Tom Wood of the Foolproof Group comments on our recent IJMR article:

"If you want to predict positive business outcomes like loyalty, word-of-mouth advocacy and satisfaction then customer experience measures may be more effective than monitoring the outcome of service events or using a net promoter score.

That’s the view of Stan Maklan and Phil Klaus in their article ‘Customer Experience: are we measuring the right things?’ in the International Journal of Market Research (IJMR) this month." 

Read more HERE

Customer Experience: are we measuring the right things?

Marketing theory and practice evolved dramatically through a series of transformations from products to services and, recently, customer experiences. Each stage has its own perspective on marketing's purpose, the nature of customer value, and measurements that calibrate performance and guide managerial decisions. The latter is of particular interest to market researchers. Measurement (research) typically lags behind changes in marketing theory due to institutional factors and the time it takes for new practices to diffuse. Klaus and Maklan (2011) posit that firms still measure customer experience against criteria more suited to evaluating product and service marketing. Research practice seems rooted in 1990s notions of service quality, itself an outgrowth of total quality management (TQM) originating in manufacturing during the 1980s. The authors argue that market researchers will serve their organizations and customers better if they take an active role in updating the customer experience measurement commensurate with advances in the conceptualization of that which firms offer customers. 

The full IJMR article is available through:
Open Depot

WARC (Free trial available) 

Mendeley