Customer experience management has been on the agenda for most organizations lately but what is it and how can it be used to improve perceptions of brands, customer satisfaction and/or profitability? Customers will always have an experience with an offering – it is impossible not to have one! The goal of this course is to give and overview of the area and equip the participants with some of the tools that is useful to capture and understand customer experiences.

We will discuss what customer experiences and customer experience management actually are and which insights organizations need to collect in order to better manage experiences. We will also illustrate how organizations can optimize the customer journey, outline how servicescapes/experiencescapes can support the customer experience, and finally, demonstrate how adopting a customer experience management logic requires the entire organization to become more customer centric.

The customer experience is comprised of cognitive, emotional, physical, sensorial, and social elements that mark the customer’s direct or indirect interaction with a (set of) market actor(s). For this reason, this course will also cover various ways of conceptualizing, measuring, and capturing customer experiences in order to derive insights that result in competitive advantage for firms.

Finally, this course will also cover customer experiences in light of the changing landscape of digital technologies. In particular, it will build on marketing, psychology, and human-computer interaction (HCI), to conceptualize customer experiences in offline, mixed reality (offline and online), and virtual environments.