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