Editor's Pick @customerthink.com: Demystifying The Black Box – How To Design, Manage, And Measure The Most Profitable Customer Experience (CX) Strategies

CX blogs, consultants, programs, workshops, conferences, indexes, frameworks, awards, summits, metrics, NPS – CX is everywhere and widely considered the next competitive battleground. Managers, consultants, scholars, and even politicians seem to agree that the age of the customer has finally arrived and we are better going to be ready for it. The new customer needs new solutions, and blue chips companies like Siemens, IBM, Adobe, Google are standing by, ready to deliver. CRM is proclaimed dead, and CX management in an area where the customer calls the shots is the declared new silver bullet for companies worldwide. Managers read the great CX stories of Apple, Amazon, and Starbucks, and are left wondering how this will apply to their business? Moreover, while we still struggle to coherently define what constitutes CX, we already discuss the next generation of CX management, the role of social media, cloud networks in delivering excellent experiences in the CX revolution you tube channel.

CX established itself as one of the top priorities on companies’ strategic agendas. It really doesn’t matter if we talk about a B2B, B2C, or even C2C context, customers will always have an experience, good or bad, and it will influence their purchasing behavior – significantly. And not only their own behavior, but also the behavior of others; courtesy of the blessing – or the curse, depending on your viewpoint – of the www and social media (Klaus 2013). Our longitudinal global research clearly indicates that delivering superior experiences is, if not the source of, a sustainable competitive advantage. However, while acknowledging CX’s strategic importance is a step in the right direction, the main challenges go beyond acknowledgement.

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Take a 'look inside' our latest book chapter highlighting emphasizes CX as the ultimate revenue and profit driver

Take a 'look inside' our latest book chapter highlighting emphasizes CX as the ultimate revenue and profit driver HERE

Striking the Right Balance: How to Design, Implement, and Operationalize Customer Experience Management Programs Phil Klaus and Bo Edvardsson (2014)

 

Towards practical relevance — Delivering superior firm performance through digital customer experience strategies

Towards practical relevance — Delivering superior firm performance through digital customer experience strategies.

Managers, consultants and scholars alike consider the digital customer experience (CX) as the next competitive battleground for firms worldwide. The development of corresponding CX strategies, however, faces a number of challenges. First, similar to all emerging fields of management, there is no universally accepted definition of the concept, its scope and how it relates to associated management initiatives, such as quality and satisfaction. Second, it is widely accepted that CX is very context-specific and that there is unlikely to be a generally applicable ‘play book’ appropriate across all industries and company strategies. Scholars portray CX disparately by exploring important facets at, regrettably, high levels of abstraction. Therefore, their research fails to consider the vital role of management in the process. In spite of a plethora of published CX definitions and conceptual frameworks, there remains a need for both theoretical and conceptual development, and empirical research to determine which digital CX strategies and practices have the most positive influence on organizational performance. To contribute to the development of CX practice and what the author characterizes as a Theory of Relevance, this article argues that scholars must conduct research to reveal current CX management practices as a necessary foundation for providing direction. A typology of CX practice will act as the foundation to explore the link between practice and performance. This study uses this typology to highlight the superior performance of firms executing a value-driven digital customer experience strategy. These vanguards, unlike others, apply value creation to all stakeholders of their business. Their business practice reflects these principles by developing a strategy crossing departmental boundaries and integrating all of the firm’s functions into one aim — delivering superior digital customer experiences.

Read and download: The role of service systems in executing customer-service experience strategies: A critical examination of existing practices (Edvardsson and Klaus 2014).

Read and download HERE: The role of service systems in executing customer-service experience strategies: A critical examination of existing practices (Edvardsson and Klaus 2014). 

Service systems enable value propositions based on creating both, favorable customer service experiences and business value. Value is experiential, individual, contextual, and meaning-laden. Scholars posit that companies must (a) offer a value proposition based on customers value perceptions, (b) align service systems with these value perceptions, and (c) incorporate customers as a resource to co-create value. In order to empirically test these propositions we examine service experience (hereafter SX) strategies and the corresponding service systems from a firm's viewpoint. This discussion not only led to development of the SXSL, which scholars believe guides firms to develop value propositions and service systems to incorporate the customer as a resource to co-create value, but also to achieving crucial connections between SX strategies and firm performance. We illustrate the effectiveness of the framework with the case of Banca di Popolare di Bari (BPB), an Italian bank implementing an SX strategy based on SXSL. This is, to our knowledge, the first empirical study demonstrating the effect of applying a co-creation-led service experience strategy to firm performance.

Free access to: Preservers, Transformers & Vanguards: Measuring the Profitability of Customer Experience Strategies @ http://www.readcube.com/articles/10.1111/drev.10260

CX may be “the next competitive battleground”, but we’re still struggling to define it.
More to the point, we have to find a way to measure CX. Otherwise, how can we become better at managing it?
Free access HERE

 

Validating the importance of all stages of the Customer Experience: The Customer Experience Continuum

Validating the importance of all stages of the Customer Experience: The Customer Experience Continuum, read it HERE.

Your customers’ perceptions and evaluations of customer experience often develop over a series of interaction, purchasing, and consumption episodes with your firm. Most services require customers to engage with a firm multiple times over an extended period of time (Klaus & Maklan 2013). These experiences are dynamic in nature, and managers need to understand how the customers’ needs change as the interactions with the firm progress. To understand the underlying triggers of these changes is even more significant to the firm given the importance of increasing customer retention and loyalty and building long-term profitable relationships with their customers.

As these customer experience episodes increase over time, marketers need to understand what attributes of these interactions drive the desirable customer behavior at the different stages of the relationship with their respective customer (Klaus & Maklan 2011).

In a longitudinal global study, covering multiple contexts and industries Prof. Dr. Phil Klaus, Professor of Customer Experience and Marketing Strategy at ESCE International Business School, not only explores these stages, but, more importantly, investigates how they influence customer behavior.