Towards a Better Measure of Customer Experience

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 is an outgrowth of the total quality management (TQM) movement of the 1980s and suffers from that movement's focus on the provider rather than the value derived by customers. Researchers today state that customer experience is generated through a longer process of company–customer interaction across multiple channels, generated through both functional and emotional clues. Our research with practitioners indicates that most firms use customer satisfaction, or its derivative the Net Promoter Score, to assess their customers'…