Integrated Customer Experience

Customer experience is the total feeling that a customer attains before and after using a particular product or associating with a particular organization. Customer experience techniques have been developed and adopted by numerous organizations to enhance competitive advantage over the competitors. This literature review explores the integrated customer experience with the focus of the origin if customer experience and the components of integrated customer experience.

Running Head: INTERGRATED CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
Literature Review: Integrated Customer Experience
Name:
Academic Affiliation:
Date:

INTERGRATED CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE 2
Abstract
Customer experience is the total feeling that a customer attains before and after using a
particular product or associating with a particular organization. Customer experience techniques
have been developed and adopted by numerous organizations to enhance competitive advantage
over the competitors. All the developed techniques way back from the Client’s purchasing
behavior process models to customer relationship marketing have resulted in integrated tools that
ensure more customer experience and satisfaction. This literature review explores the integrated
customer experience with the focus of the origin if customer experience and the components of
integrated customer experience. The findings of the literature review thus can be used to develop
a project on the impact of integrated customer experience on organizational performance.
Introduction
Over the past decade, Customer satisfaction has improved tremendously. Over 51%
consumer’s survey by international customer satisfaction indicated that improved customer
experience. Numerous organizations have adopted various techniques that have enabled them to
integrate customer experience thus offering them better marketing capability for a better
competitive environment. Products and organizational attributes such as high quality print and
services, good atmosphere among many others result in a positive client experience that is
obtainable from the customer's views and opinions shared through various means (Shihab,
Sukrisna & Hidayanto, 2015). A delightful customer act as a powerful tool in driving the
business into success since the customers not only buy from the organization but also market the
business through various means such as word of mouth and social media platform. Integrated

INTERGRATED CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE 3
customer experience thus refers to the process of using customer experiences as the basis of
marketing in an organization to attain a better competitive advantage (Lin, 2012). Marketing is
essential for the conversion of respect to clients, and the conversion is done only achieve the
loyalty of the normal customers that only take place when the organization offers bets
experiences. There, an integrated customer experience acts as a significant marketing aspect to
drive the organization to achieve its objectives. The current paper is a literature review of
integrated customer experience as making mix tool of an organization.
Customer experience origin
Earlier scholars such as La and Yi, (2015) stated that people desires were not products
nut rather the satisfying experience. Furthering the notion, other experimentalist theories such as
Holbrook and Hirschman elaborated on the human behavior about emotional aspect during the
decision making. Over the past decades, marketing professionals have also embraced the study
of customer experience noting that consumer likes purchasing from a series if enjoyable,
memorable events offered by the organization. Multiple definitions thus exist in the marketing
field. The term customer experience is attributed to Bernd Schmitt, who denoted the term as the
strategical administration of client’s feeling within a company. According to Trini and Salim
(2018), the term customer experience comprises of different cognitive, physical, divine and
societal aspects that spot customer’s direct and indirect collaboration resulting in the overall
experience. Srivastava, (2012) defines customer counter as the core and idiosyncratic responses
from the customer through interaction with the organization. In understanding the integrated
client’s experience in the current business sentiment, it is worth to explore the subsequent
development and inputs of clients experience study that entails:

INTERGRATED CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE 4
The client is purchasing behavior process models
The client is purchasing behavior process models that were developed in the 1960s that
focused on multiple different items such as emotions. Later the model focused on nonlinear
effects of satisfaction. Studies that were conducted by Aunkofer, (2018) extensively accessed the
effects of satisfaction on customer behavior as well as organizational performance thus became a
significant factor in marketing. According to Ahn, Back & Barišić, (2019), Service quality
deleted in the 1980s as a separate discipline with special services such as attributes such as
intangibility and personal interactions among many others. During this period, organizations
began to realize the significance of marketing service as compared to the marketing of goods,
thus led to the development of SERQUAL model that has been one of the marketing theories.
The service marketing thus forms the basis of customer experience journey to the integrated
customer experience.
In 1990s relationship marketing was developed majorly between business enterprise,
however later gained an increase between business and customer, and has been extensively tested
with customer markets. The major elements that have been included in the relationship
marketing include trust, switching cost, and commitment and association quality among many
others. Therefore, relationship marketing has significantly contributed to the understanding of
the client’s experience through sentiments and insights that are correlated with experience.
Customer relationship management
According to Xavier, (2015) relationship marketing resulted in stronger value extraction:
customer relationship marketing that aimed at building a strong long-term relationship between
organization and customers. Al-Dmour, Ali & Al-Dmour (2019) state that long term and strong

INTERGRATED CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE 5
relationship are both major organization’s objectives and are significant in collecting more
revenue in an organization. Therefore, it led to the development of multiple studies to determine
various ways to motivate, retain and create loyalty among the potential customers.
Customer centricity and customer focus
During the late 2000s, a notion of customer centricity emerged as a way of marketing.
The model focused on understanding the needs of the customer and delivering the values to the
individual rather than focusing on the entire population. The focus on the individual customer
has become fruitful to numerous organizations as a result of the individual level information that
is used to create a long term financial value of the potential customers. Due to the significance of
customer centricity and focus, numerous tools have been developed to aid marketing such as
“customer persona” and “job-to-be-done.”
Customer Engagement
Client engagement emerged in the present era where customer management is paramount
to every organization. Customer engagement majorly focuses on distinguishing customer
feelings and actions outside the product acquisition. Thus concentrating on the perspective of the
feelings Taskin, (2017) defines the client’s engagement as the psychological state that results
from the interactive and corrective customer experience. The model thus tends to encourage
customers to participate more in the organizational activities to results in more experience and
relationship. Customer engagement thus has been developed into with the current technological
development such as social media leading to integrated customer experience. According to
Xavier, (2015) the internet, the revolution has resulted in transformed and empowered
customers, who currently engage more with various organizational activities.

INTERGRATED CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE 6
Importance of customer experience
Numerous authors such as Srivastava, (2012) on their works have made it clear that
customer experience offers organizations with new methods of competing. Offering excellent
customer experience is significant since it assures customer satisfaction, customer loyalty as well
as customer’s coincidence. However, despite the numerous research on the benefits of customer
ex0erince, there still suggestions from surveys that good customer experiences are common
among organizations. In the current competitive world, more than 65% are always dissatisfied
due to the inconsistent customer supply among numerous organizations. Xavier, (2015) states
that the low customer experience among the organizations is due to the inadequate interaction
between the product and the touch points since the organizations fail to establish a clear process
in place to optimize and standardize the customer experience.
Integrated customer experience
Integrated customer experience refers to one platform that unites all the customer
experience platforms to enhance the customer experience. Vanitha, (2012) suggest that
employees, social, economic and technologies while used together results not integrated
customer experience. Numerous organizations employ different technologies in achieving
integrated customers experience and these include.
Self-service Technology
Self-service technologies have been used by numerous organizations. The technology
applied across the spectrum via different interfaces like interactive voice response (IVR). Self-
service technologies enable customers to make transactions without interpersonal contact
between a busier and a seller. According to Sindwani and Goel, (2015) integrated customer

INTERGRATED CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE 7
experience enables the customer to experience that offer values and create loyalty; therefore,
organizations need to know different touch points. In the current technological world, internet
interface is used for packaging tracking, account information, e-economic interface.
Insight communities
Insight communities refer to the thousand collections of customers that are the heart to
provide feedback to the company in order to improve on the product as well as the service. These
various feedbacks offer the organization the context to identify the attainable insight into the
collected information through net promoters score (NPS) ( Baldus, 2015). The insight
communities that help in creating long-lasting trust among the firms and the clients since it can
determine the root cause of customer dissatisfaction. Traditionally, organizations would launch
products into the market and wait for feedback to identify problems in the product then later
attempt to fix them. However, integrated customer experience tools work like the design
thinkers; who instead of looking for the symptoms of problems and attempting to retrofit parts,
the tool aims at improving the experience through understanding what customer wants to do and
then apply the knowledge to construct a better experience.
Big Data and Analytics
In the current technological numerous organizations achieve customer experience
through the emerging analytic consumer analytics and retail analytics(Singh, 2018). The digital
marketing such a social media thus offers the great capability of enhancing customer experience
through artificial intelligence and radio frequency identification technology such as in Amazon.
Personal assistant and Concierge Programs

INTERGRATED CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE 8
Even in the current digital world, personalized services have become part and parcel of
the customer experience in numerous organizations. Organizations are currently investing many
funds in creating customer engagement software and other mobile applications that focus on
strengthening the relationship between the customer and the organization(Neal & Neal,(2016).
Through the personal assistant and concierge applications, an organization can mimic their
customers. Some organization such as hotels is currently using check-in applications to their
customers to enhance the ability to choose their rooms thus enhancing the customer experience.
Human-centered Design
In the current competitive business environment, every organization thus is striving to
create a distinctive customer experience. According to Srivastava, R. (2012) companies such as
Uber tend to outperform their competitors due to their elegance human-centered design within
their applications that provided services that are have tailored experience. These human-centered
applications thus can deliver experiences that are according to the human wants, needs, and
behaviors in minds and these are only achievable when the customers are involved during the
creation of such applications to achieve an integrated customer experience.
Steps to integrated customer experience
Guzdial, (2015) identifies that one major challenge to the current organizations is the
inability to have a well-integrated customer experience due to the numerous technical
advancement. Organizations thus need to have systematic development in creating and platform
that offers integrated customer experience through following systematic steps as suggested by
Khodadadi, Abdi & Khalili (2016). Kim & Kim (2015) states theta the first steps are: Customer
experience definition by the organization through identification the touch point that needs to be

INTERGRATED CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE 9
addressed. For example, in superstore such as Tesco, positive customer experience can be
defined by the addition of more items on the online basket while vehicles companies such as
Toyota, the experience can be defined as the increase of the brokerage charges. Thus the
identified measurable touch points offer the organization the opportunity to work towards
creating a good customer experience.
Mapping of the customer journey
Organizations thus should have different channels that are essential in creating customer
experience such as mobile apps, websites, and social media among many others. Through
capturing all the customer information from the various channels, the organization should use the
data to collate disparate data to enable them to map a continuous customer journey. The
customer journey is essential in predicting the customer's behaviors as well as personalizing the
experiences to each customer thus boosting the satisfaction as well as the loyalty.
The collaboration of the customer journey with the experience
Organizations should be able to discover the different customers “paths” that drive the
overall customer experience and thus should segment the customers based on different elements
such as demographic, survey data and tenure among many others. Through this, the organization
thus can create are; the relationship between the customer profile, experience, and paths. Lastly,
the organization should strive to have continuous learning and feedback platform to enhance
conscious improve, on the customer experience. Gallarza, Gil and Holbrook, (2011) states this
customer experience is not a one-time activity thus having an integrated customer experience
needs systematic journey with integrating ion of all the platforms to work as one channel with
the focus on the customer satisfaction.

INTERGRATED CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE 10
Conclusion
It is evidential from the literature that customers are the cornerstone of every successful
business since a delightful customer experience has the capability of repurchasing as well as
having positive word of mouth on the organization enhancing the marketability. Customer
experience dates back and has gone through development and transformation to the current
integrated customer experience that is significant to all organizations to remain relevant in the
competitive environment. Integrated competitive customer experience thus entails the use of all
employees, customers, economic, social among other aspects to create to place the customer and
the focus. The integrated customer experience tools such as self =service technology, Insight
communities, Personal Assistant and Concierge Program, and Human-centered Design are
significant to the current business organizations and Big data.

INTERGRATED CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE 11
References
Ahn, J., Back, K., & Barišić, P. (2019). The effect of dynamic integrated resort experience on
Croatian customer behavior. Journal Of Travel & Tourism Marketing, 36(3), 358-370. doi:
10.1080/10548408.2018.1557097
Al-Dmour, H., Ali, W., & Al-Dmour, R. (2019). The Relationship Between Customer
Engagement, Satisfaction, and Loyalty. International Journal Of Customer Relationship
Marketing And Management, 10(2), 35-60. doi: 10.4018/ijcrmm.2019040103
Aunkofer, R. (2018). Connecting the World and Reinventing Customer Centricity. Gfk
Marketing Intelligence Review, 10(2), 54-59. doi: 10.2478/gfkmir-2018-0019
Baldus, B. (2015). Insight Generation with Marketing Research Online Communities
(MROCs). Journal Of Internet Commerce, 14(4), 476-491. doi:
10.1080/15332861.2015.1101945
Gallarza, M., Gil-Saura, I., & Holbrook, M. (2011). The value of value: Further excursions on
the meaning and role of customer value. Journal Of Consumer Behaviour, 10(4), 179-191.
doi: 10.1002/cb.328
Guzdial, M. (2015). Learner-Centered Design of Computing Education: Research on Computing
for Everyone. Synthesis Lectures On Human-Centered Informatics, 8(6), 1-165. doi:
10.2200/s00684ed1v01y201511hci033
Khodadadi, P., Abdi, F., & Khalili-Damghani, K. (2016). An Integrated Model of Customer
Experience, Perceived Value, Satisfaction, and Loyalty in Electronic Stores. International
Journal Of Enterprise Information Systems, 12(4), 31-46. doi: 10.4018/ijeis.2016100103

INTERGRATED CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE 12
Kim, S., & Kim, Y. (2015). The Development of Customer Experience Management
Competency Scale in the Manufacturing industry - Top Plan DNC Customer Experience
Management Casestudy -. KOREA SCIENCE & ART FORUM, 20, 135. doi:
10.17548/ksaf.2015.06.20.135
La, S., & Yi, Y. (2015). A Critical Review of Customer Satisfaction, Customer Loyalty,
Relationship Marketing, and Customer Relationship Management. Korean Marketing
Review, 30(1), 53. doi: 10.15830/kmr.2015.30.1.53
Lin, S. (2012). Customer Orientation and Cross-Buying: The Mediating Effects of Relational
Selling Behavior and Relationship Quality. Journal Of Management Research, 4(4). doi:
10.5296/jmr.v4i4.2350
Neal, J., & Neal, L. (2016). Self-Directed Learning in Physician Assistant Education. The
Journal Of Physician Assistant Education, 27(4), 162-169. doi:
10.1097/jpa.0000000000000091
Shihab, M., Sukrisna, I., & Hidayanto, A. (2015). Investigating customer relationship
management systems involvement towards customer knowledge creation
processes. International Journal Of Electronic Customer Relationship Management, 9(1),
56. doi: 10.1504/ijecrm.2015.070698
Sindwani, R., & Goel, D. (2015). Technology Based Self Service Banking Service Quality
Evaluation: a Graph Theoretic Approach. International Journal Of Advanced Science And
Technology, 80, 1-18. doi: 10.14257/ijast.2015.80.01
Singh, A. (2018). Customized biomedical informatics. Big Data Analytics, 3(1). doi:
10.1186/s41044-018-0030-3

INTERGRATED CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE 13
Srivastava, R. (2012). Shift of Marketing Mix to E-Marketing Mix: The Birth to New Era. SSRN
Electronic Journal. doi: 10.2139/ssrn.1992936
Taskin, E. (2017). Effects of customer engagement behavior on customer
loyalty. Pressacademia, 3(1), 599-608. doi: 10.17261/pressacademia.2017.636
Trini, D., & Salim, M. (2018). Customer Experience Marketing (CEM), Customer Satisfaction
and Customer Trust Affects Customer Loyalty: A Study on Star Hotels in Jakarta
Province. Business Management And Strategy, 9(2), 100. doi: 10.5296/bms.v9i2.13615
Vanitha, D. (2012). Customer Relationship Management on Customer Satisfaction. International
Journal Of Scientific Research, 3(4), 1-3. doi: 10.15373/22778179/apr2014/240
Xavier, L. (2015). A Study on the Relationships among Body Sensory Experience, Customer
Satisfaction and Customer Loyalty-Beauty SPA Center as an Example. International
Journal Of Business And Administrative Studies, 1(1). doi: 10.20469/ijbas.10003-2