ServiceFriday: Improving the Customer Experience

What do Disneyland and Harvard University have in common? They both represent complex service systems that offer very unique customer experiences. The traditional definition of customer experience has been “The perceived outcome of the customer interacting with the firm during the service process.” Recent conceptualizations and theories have led to the emergence of a new definition which pins customer experience as “a customer’s ‘journey’ which emerges from an iterative and dynamic process over time and involves multiple touchpoints.”  

In a study recently published in the Journal of Services Marketing, researchers used three design methods to holistically analyze the customer experience: Personas, observations, and collaborative service mapping. Researchers chose to focus on two very different service industries for this case study: Theme parks and universities. Both service settings examined in this study were located in the Gold Coast of Australia.

First, researchers selected participants for the theme park environment to be teenagers between the ages of 13-18, since they tend to be the most opinionated population for that setting. Next, for the university environment they selected Chinese international students attending the Gold Coast universities due to the existing culture challenges that are often found in the customer experience.

After conducting phenomenological interviews, personas were constructed to offer detailed descriptions of behaviors and interests relevant to a target audience. Observations were made through field notes and photographs of the respective theme parks and universities. Finally, two separate participatory design sessions were held between the researchers and the teenagers, then the researchers and the Chinese international students.

The phenomenological interviews allowed researchers to better understand the detailed background of the two customer groups. “The persona representing the theme park customer group is an active and social adolescent whose lifeworld is mainly structured around his family, friends, school and hobbies,” the researchers wrote. “In turn, the persona representing the university customer group is an international student who finds herself immersed in an entirely new lifeworld. She still has strong bonds with her family and is faced with the ongoing challenge of negotiating her way through an unfamiliar social environment.”

The observations conducted gave new insights into the interaction between customers and service firms, as well as the “customers’ flow of actions throughout the service process”. Researchers acknowledged, however, that the observations made were limited to the actual service setting.  

Collaborative service mapping led researchers to discover the importance of social context in both cases. “The collaborative service mapping activity led to insights into how customers co-create their unique experiences by integrating resources from multiple sources, including their social context.” Examples of the social context involved were the social media posts that enhanced the customer experience for theme park customers, while a lack of university clubs and activities led to a more difficult social transition for the Chinese international students.

Managerial implications

Customer experiences are very complex, difficult to map out, and challenging to analyze, but this should not deter management from gaining a better understanding in attempting to improve the customer experience. The researchers offered some suggestions to encourage managers to move beyond traditional market research methods:

• Actively involve customers through participatory design approaches that can create precious insights into the circumstances surroundings customers’ “value creation processes.”
• Generate deep knowledge of the customers’ value creation processes by carefully studying the customers’ lifeworld and social context (which can be done through narrative inquiry and personas).
• Leverage customer insights by focusing on the user-selection process and the application of design tools.

Erring on the side of caution, researchers warn managers that they must be aware that “even the customers in a well-defined target market might have very unique experiences, owing to the context-specificity of value creation.” They recommend managers increase the generic nature of these analysis’ by identifying the social attributes of the customer experience that are the most critical to their efforts.

You can learn more about the customer experience and its’ impact on the service industry by reading the full article at the Journal of Services Marketing. (A fee may apply.)