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.

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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.