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.