Analytical tools for evaluating customer experience in the context of marketing management of service companies

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to theoretically elaborate the model of formation of customer experience of service organisations at the conceptual level and to conduct a study using the developed tools for its evaluation on the example of the hotel business. The main results were based on the principle of holistic personalism and are obtained using the methods of field marketing research, questionnaire survey of respondents, scoring and index method. The data were processed and analysed using statistical correlation analysis, graphical and matrix approaches. The Customer development methodology was used to form a chain of positive customer reactions. The article substantiates a conceptual model of formation of customer experience in service organizations based on the principles of behavioural theory. The article allocates 2 groups of factors on the example of hotels that form the customer experience: explicit and implicit, and includes 6 factor attributes. Three types of customer experience are distinguished: before the moment of consumption of the product – the expected experience (CX ex en.), at the moment of consumption – as the perceived customer experience (CX at the time), and intentions for future consumption of the service product (CX ex post). To assess them, 4 marketing metrics were proposed to evaluate each type of customer experience. To interpret the results, the values of the indicators are scaled. The carried out testing of the proposed methodology on a sample of 14 four-star hotels confirmed the hypotheses of the study. The proposed theoretical concept and evaluation tools can be further used to develop marketing programmes for Customer Experience Management (CXM).