The antecedents of customer experience and net promoter score
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School of Business |
Master's thesis
Authors
Date
2021
Department
Major/Subject
Mcode
Degree programme
Marketing
Language
en
Pages
83
Series
Abstract
Customer experience is one of the most influential marketing concepts of the current decade. The most radical claims have even declared branding “dead” – If the brands are essentially just evaluations of customer’s experiences, why would a marketing manager settle for managing the brand elements instead of their true antecedents, the experience? Regardless of the skyrocketing enthusiasm around the concept, in business world the true essence of customer experience is, if not misunderstood, at least unclear. There are many reasons behind this confusion. For example, there is not one universally agreed definition of customer experience. Also, during its infancy spent mostly in the consulting world most of the attention was paid to its applications, whereas the responsibility for definitions was left for the academia later on. The aim of the first part of this paper is to summarise customer experience related literature, and build a clear picture of the antecedents of customer experience. After presenting my view of customer experience as a concept, I turned my focus to one of the most popular tools of customer experience management, the Net Promoter Score (NPS). Although it is often used as a customer experience metric, the connection between customer experience quality and NPS scores has been disputed. Using a data set of 18 778 customers responding up to 195 questions I conducted a correlation analysis to find out if there was a correlation between CX antecedents and the NPS to be found. The goal of this thesis was to find out answers for three research questions: “Q1: What is customer experience?”, “Q2: Is NPS a customer experience metric?”, and “Q3: How should NPS be used?”. As results I declared customer experience to be the latest iteration of the decades long term towards ultimate customer orientation. I defined its antecedents to be (borrowing from Maklan & Klaus (2011)), Peace-of-Mind, Outcome Focus, Moments-of-Truth and Product Experience. The quantitative analysis of this thesis could not confirm nor validate NPS’s status as a customer experience metric, but some dark shadows were cast over it. Many customer experience related variables seemed to have moderately high Pearson correlation coefficients with the NPS answers of the customers. However, the analysis could not show any outstanding reasons to believe that the NPS could capture the holistic nature of the customer experience. Instead, the NPS’s ability to reflect the long-term relationship dimension of customer experience was doubted, as the most recent answers to Customer Effort Score and Care -surveys seemed to correlate higher to the NPS than their averages. This would strengthen NPS’s status as a customer satisfaction metric instead of a customer experience metric. As an outcome I would suggest using NPS as a light customer feedback system that generates lots of rich data and gives an up-to-date view to the customer satisfaction on the different touchpoints of the customer journey.Description
Thesis advisor
Bhatnagar, KushagraKeywords
customer experience, net promoter score, customer experience management, customer orientation