The interplay of customer experience and commitment

Purpose This research aims to better understand customer experience, as it relates to customer commitment and provides a framework for future research into the intersection of these emerging streams of research. Design/methodology/approach This research contributes to theoretical and practical perspectives on customer experience and its measurement by integrating extant literature with customer commitment and customer satisfaction literature. Findings The breadth of the domains that encompass customer experience – cognitive, emotional, physical, sensorial and social – makes simplistic metrics impossible for gauging the entirety of customers’ experiences. These findings provide strong support of the need for new research into customer experience and customer commitment. Practical implications Given the complexity of customer experience, managers are unlikely to track and manage all relevant elements of the concept. This research provides a framework identifying empirically the most salient attributes of customer experience with particular emphasis on those elements that enhance commitment. This offers insight into service design to correspond with specific commitment and experience dimensions. Originality/value This research is the first to examine the customer experience as it relates to customer commitment – a key factor in customer loyalty, positive word of mouth and other desired outcomes for managers and marketers. This paper provides a framework for future research into these emerging topics. </jats:sec

The cumulative effect of satisfaction with discrete transactions on share of wallet

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to propose a theoretical model for how consumers aggregate satisfaction with individual service encounters to form a summary evaluation of satisfaction, and further examines its effect on customers' share of category spending (share of wallet (SOW)). Design/methodology/approach - The data used consist of 10,983 completed surveys from 1,448 customers whose transaction-specific satisfaction with a retailer and their subsequent purchase behaviors in the category were tracked for more than four transactions. Mixed effects models were employed to test the relationship between the cumulative effect of satisfaction with multiple service encounters on SOW. Findings - Cumulative satisfaction is a weighted average of satisfaction with specific encounters, with weights decaying geometrically so that more recent encounters receive more weight. More recent transaction-specific satisfaction levels tend to have greater influence on customers' next purchase SOW allocations; this, however, is only the case for customers who are less than highly satisfied, with a rating of 8 or lower on a ten-point scale. Additionally, the impact of transaction-specific satisfaction on SOW is not linear. Highly positive transaction-specific satisfaction levels have a greater impact on SOW than negative levels. Practical implications - Many companies monitor satisfaction across multiple service encounters. This study shows how one can aggregate these measures to arrive at a cumulative effect, and highlights the importance to discriminate between first, more and less recent encounters and second, low vs high levels of satisfaction to better understand customers' spending among different providers. Originality/value - Using a longitudinal data set with real customers, this paper identifies a new measure for taking into account the cumulative satisfaction, identifies the positivity bias, and shows how recency affects the relationship between satisfaction and SOW

Perceptions are relative: an examination of the relationship between relative satisfaction metrics and share of wallet

Purpose - There is general agreement among researchers and practitioners that satisfaction is relative to competitive alternatives. Nonetheless, researchers and managers have not treated satisfaction as a relative construct. The result has been weak relationships between satisfaction and share of wallet in the literature, and challenges by managers as to whether satisfaction is a useful predictor of customer behavior and business outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to explore the best approach for linking satisfaction to share of wallet. Design/methodology/approach - Using data from 79,543 consumers who provided 258,743 observations regarding the brands that they use (over 650 brands) covering 20 industries from 15 countries, various models such as the Wallet Allocation Rule (WAR), Zipf-AE, and Zipf-PM, truncated geometric model, generalization of the WAR and hierarchical regression models are compared to each other. Findings - The results indicate that the relationship between satisfaction and share of wallet is primarily driven by the relative fulfillment customers perceive from the various brands that they use (as gauged by their relative ranked satisfaction level), and not the absolute level of satisfaction. Practical implications - The findings provide practical insight into several easy-to-use approaches that researchers and managers can apply to improve the strength of the relationship between satisfaction and share of wallet. Originality/value - This research provides support to the small number of studies that point to the superiority of using relative metrics, and encourages the adoption of relative satisfaction metrics by the academic community

Perceptions are relative: an examination of the relationship between relative satisfaction metrics and share of wallet

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The Interplay of Customer Experience and Commitment

Purpose This research aims to better understand customer experience, as it relates to customer commitment and provides a framework for future research into the intersection of these emerging streams of research. Design/methodology/approach This research contributes to theoretical and practical perspectives on customer experience and its measurement by integrating extant literature with customer commitment and customer satisfaction literature. Findings The breadth of the domains that encompass customer experience – cognitive, emotional, physical, sensorial and social – makes simplistic metrics impossible for gauging the entirety of customers’ experiences. These findings provide strong support of the need for new research into customer experience and customer commitment. Practical implications Given the complexity of customer experience, managers are unlikely to track and manage all relevant elements of the concept. This research provides a framework identifying empirically the most salient attributes of customer experience with particular emphasis on those elements that enhance commitment. This offers insight into service design to correspond with specific commitment and experience dimensions. Originality/value This research is the first to examine the customer experience as it relates to customer commitment – a key factor in customer loyalty, positive word of mouth and other desired outcomes for managers and marketers. This paper provides a framework for future research into these emerging topics.</p