Authors: Roberto Mora Cortez; Wesley J. Johnston
Customer Experience (CX) is probably the most novel concept of marketing science. Its known genesis comes from applied publications in the late 1990s. Since then, researchers have been inspired and thus have developed studies mainly focused on the business-to-consumer (B2C) context. In business-to-business (B2B) research, however, there is no clear understanding of the term and its implications only three publications actually include B2B data in a differentiated manner and analyzed the particularities of the industrial setting. Since the world is turning to experiences, there is a need of conceptual and practical clarifications therefore, we review the applied and academic literature of CX from the last 20 years. We introduce the three-layer B2B CX framework in order to position a theoretical and pragmatic milestone. The layers’ interaction involves: B2B experience life cycle map, customer service, and expectations. The specified seven phases in the experience life cycle map are a key contribution to the sequential development of B2B CX with time as the parameter. We include both supplier and customer perspectives in our analyses and state difference between a product-centric and service-centric context. Then, we introduce into the model the customer team and the supplier team in order to strongly emphasize that B2B CX involves multiple human interaction with support of virtual elements. We represent this interaction through an empirical case. The experience is lived individually, and, therefore, is corrected by personal expectations that are generally influenced by corporate goals and requirements. These personal experiences are shared through interaction by all decision making unit (DMU) participants. Finally, we discuss how B2B CX can be managed by practitioners and how researchers can improve theory building over our key foundations
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Publish Year: 2016
Conference: Cape Town (2016)