Managing the strategical components of customer experience in b2c context

Customer experience is seen as the next big industrial trend, and it has been integrated into companies’ agendas and strategies. On top of the relevancy of the concept from a managerial perspective, customer experience research is also considered a top priority in marketing research. Although it is widely essential, the idea is still relevantly new: as the epistemological background was only introduced a year prior to this research. The objective of this thesis was to combine the academic background and the expertise of customer experience professionals operating in different industries in Finland, both in the private and the public sectors. Semi-structural interviews were used to gather the information from the customer experience professionals. In conclusion, six consistent categories of the transcriptions of the recorded interviews were formed. The main conclusion of this research is that customer experience is an individual’s subjective, context-specific and spontaneous response to an offering related stimuli that occur along the customer journey. While companies cannot directly create customer experiences, companies can manage components resulting in intended customer experience. Ways to drive customer experience discussed in the interviews were done by considering internal and external factors. Various different designing tools to visualise, evaluate and analyse customer journey were used, additionally to different touchpoints. The main point was to focus resources on the relevant touchpoints, designing intentional stimuli causing a desired response, measuring and reporting, and achieving bigger goals