Integrated Customer Experience: A Comprehensive Report Analysis

This report provides a comprehensive literature review on integrated customer experience, focusing on the evolution of marketing techniques and customer-centric philosophies. The analysis explores how businesses are adapting to digital transformations, leveraging data from various channels like social media and email to understand customer satisfaction and behavior. The report delves into the importance of customer experience as a continuous journey, emphasizing the need for businesses to monitor interactions, personalize experiences, and build brand loyalty. It examines how companies can utilize customer journey mapping, segmenting target consumers, and developing data-driven action plans. The report also highlights the significance of employee engagement, interdepartmental collaboration, and the integration of customer feedback into all levels of the organization. The conclusion emphasizes the importance of delivering superior customer service and experiences to maintain brand loyalty and outperform competitors in today's dynamic market.

Running head: INTEGRATED CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
Integrated Customer Experience
Name of the University:
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Part A
Customer experience is the heart of marketing for each and every industry. It has
always been a focus for the marketers to embrace the customer centric philosophies and
create more and more effective strategies. It has led to positive digital transformations and
today’s business is adopting those measures in order to succeed. The purpose of the project is
to review the current literatures on Integrated Customer Experience and understand the
visibility of the marketing techniques. Off lately, measuring marketing has been on the
endless loop and along with confessions over Facebook, businesses gather sound information
regarding customer experiences and their satisfaction regarding those products or services. In
addition to this, some companies aim to connect the email, social media sites and other
marketing strategies and get benefited by incorporating those.
As far as the structure of the report is concerned, the topic of Integrated Customer
Experience is being discussed in a very detailed manner. Several academic papers are being
reviewed and presented in the most ethical manner. Moreover, Harvard style referencing is
being done along with relevant in-text citations. The topic is being introduced in the
beginning, the literatures are being reviewed by contrasting and comparing the features and
based on that, conclusion has been drawn. Integrated Customer Experience is a very
interesting topic, which has assisted in understanding how the marketers work in
collaboration with the organizational leaders, to cater to the maximum number of audiences.
A detailed analysis is being done in the next segment of the assignment, along with literature
review.

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Part B
Introduction
Integrated customer management can be referred to as a business strategy to improve
the support via sharing information between the discrete departments. Integrated customer
management brings three different principles of business; customer-centricity, agility and
alignment. In the year 2004, the phrase integrated customer management was being coined by
Amdocs. In communications industry, the phrase is quite common. The experience of the
customers is entirely an emotional concept that manifests them in different ways, based on
the industrial aspects. For retailers like Tesco, a positive experience of the consumers can be
demonstrated as adding more products to their online baskets or by signing up for
membership cards.
On the other hand, for vehicle dealers customer experiences can be increasing charges
for brokerage or referring to the friends or peers. According to Shobeiri, Mazaheri and
Laroche (2018), it is immensely important to define the experiences of the consumers at
measurable terms, whatever may be the goals or objectives. By measurable terms, they meant
a composite of several variables, which impact the business. The purpose of the study is to
analyze the existing literatures on Integrated Customer Experience and the areas related to it.
Various articles are being reviewed in order to gain a detailed understanding of the topic and
presented in this study.
Literature Review
According to Weill and Woerner (2018), integrated customer experience is the major
aspect of each and every company’s daily operations. Companies should take the experiences
of the consumers into consideration, for their success. Customers now a day, directly interact

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with the companies through several channels, from websites to the physical stores, social
media websites and mobile applications. The fashion retailer of United Kingdom, Oasis,
combines their e-commerce sites, mobile applications, in store iPads, physical stores and
online ‘seek and send’ services, in order to keep in touch with their target consumers. This
particularly gives an idea that the organizations are dealing with their consumers’ feedbacks
by combining these sources.
By collating these data sets, the companies now a day, are able to map their
continuous journey of the consumers. This, in turn enables the organizations to predict the
behaviors or attitudes of the consumers, helping them to personalize their experiences.
Moreover, it also assists in boosting the loyalty of the consumers. Most importantly, the data
sources are to be used when available, at an incremental fashionable way, instead of waiting
for the sources to merge. As per Terblanche’s (2018) opinion, by utilizing the part modeling
concept or idea on the journey of customers’ map, the businesses can invent new paths that
drive the overall experiences of the customers.
In addition to this, the organizations should ensure that they are segmenting their
target consumers on the basis of their demographics, tenure or survey. This will allow them
to tie up the relationships with the customer paths, experiences or profiles. It is important for
the companies to develop their data driven action plans. Moreover, in the words of Alnawas
and Hemsley-Brown (2018), the correlation between the profiles of the consumers, their
interaction journey and experiences has been quantified. Then, the companies can create a
document of the favorable as well as unfavorable paths for each profile of the consumers.
This can prove to be highly beneficial for the companies in order to prioritize their consumers
as well as their actions, having a higher impact on the organizations.

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On the contrary, Bijmolt et al. (2018) opined that continuous learning of the
consumers’ behaviors or attitudes, their feedbacks can lead to improvement. Once all these
methods are being placed on time, the companies can easily assess their improvement
chances and keep a track of their target consumers’ feedbacks. Enhancing the experiences of
the consumers is obviously not a one-time job; instead it is necessarily a big time exercise. It
can be said that consumer experience is a continuous journey that evolves constantly in order
to keep updated with the new technological developments, analytical developments and
analytical habits.
In the words of Warnaby and Shi (2018), each and every interaction with the
customers, no matter how big or small, must be monitored consistently. It is immensely
important for the organizations to ensure that they are connecting the dots for building an
evolving system in order to improve each encounter. Moreover, Stouthuysen et al. (2018)
stated that the way of communication has been changed due to digital disruptions and also,
how the brands communicate with their target consumers. The organizations can no longer
ignore the queries of their customers and hide behind their well built marketing campaigns. A
well placed Facebook post or tweet from a single customer have the power to tarnish the
brand’s image or expose poor practices of the brand.
According to Surridge et al. (2018), majority of the businesses see this free speech as
their liability. On the contrary, they commented that it is an amazing asset for the companies,
which would help in improving their services or products. This is what sets different brands
apart and thus; it helps in creating customer experiences and a personal identity of the brand.
Without these mentioned factors to support the market offerings, the customers may choose
other brands, which create better and memorable experiences for them. The connecting or
bonding with the customers must be a major part of every company’s mission and enhancing

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those connections falls under the responsibility of each and every organizational member.
This is not just the domain of marketing or sales teams, but for the entire organization.
On the contrary, Terblanche (2018) stated that the companies should think of its
employees as their brand ambassadors. In this manner, they can increase their customer
outreach or marketing potential efforts exponentially. Moreover, if the employees are turned
into true brand ambassadors, the existing hierarchies or walls fall to a certain level. It is
highly important to integrate the consumers’ experiences into the entry levels of business.
The customers’ journey starts with the product’s conception and winds up in a positive loop,
ideally, in terms of relationship maintenance. In addition to this, every person in the
organization need to do something more for their brands in order to cater to the most number
of target customers.
The organizational managers or leaders need to undertake innovative measures in
order to restructure the departments, so that it works closely. This would enable them to
spend more and more time talking with the customers and resolving their issues or queries, if
any. The office administrators should have the opportunities to gather feedback from the
vendors or other individuals who happen to cross their areas. As per Bhattacharya, Srivastava
and Verma (2018), each and every organizational member must have the abilities of taking
ownership of their roles and also add value to the experiences of the consumers.
The organizations may not only work for sending monthly newsletters, but also they
must be able to connect those dots, which exist between their consumer outcome and work.
The businesses need to prioritize some practices in order to become more and more customer
centric, which are being discussed by Röllecke, Huchzermeier and Schröder (2018).
Encouraging the employees across all the levels of customer services will help in achieving
their individual goals, objectives or mission. In addition to this, allowing the employees to

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engage into interdepartmental meetings or crowd source ideas is considered to be immensely
important for the organizations, on a regular basis.
Dedeoglu et al. (2018) opined that innovation can generate from anywhere and in
addition to this, the employees can engage into these matters for creating a feeling of
accountability and improve the productivity levels or job satisfaction. Moreover, trying out
for new ideas can benefit the organizations to a huge extent, in order to understand the
consumer experiences. In addition to this, successful organizations like Kabbage and
Facebook are not afraid of trying out new concepts or ideas to stay in front of the consumers
and that too, in more exciting manner. The social media contents, blogs, reviews, eBooks,
papers and other are considered to be the most crucial aspects of marketing and thus, the
business leaders must keep these factors into consideration.
Similarly, as mentioned by Kandampully, Zhang and Jaakkola (2017), truly
understanding the needs or demands of the consumers can help the companies to improve or
enhance not only their buying experience, but at the same time their bottom line. An
organization’s relationship with its target consumers is much more than just about improving
the ratings of the products or decreasing their wait times. Gaining an understanding of the
overall journey of the consumers and learning what they experience since the beginning of
the purchasing time and then buying it, can be beneficial for the companies. Moreover, it
must be done in the simplest, clear as well as efficient manner as per Jain, Aagja and Bagdare
(2017).
Mahrous and Hassan (2017) defined the concept of consumer experience as the
interactions between organizations with its customers, all throughout the business
relationships. The interactions may include discovery, awareness, advocacy, cultivation,
service and purchases. The customer experience is being regarded as the most integral part of

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the customer relationship management and this is the reason, why businesses try to maintain
a positive relationship with their target consumers. Homburg, Jozić and Kuehnl (2017)
mentioned that if the companies want to stay loyal, it is important for them to invest a
significant amount in analyzing the experiences of their target consumers.
Conclusion
To conclude, it can be said that the happier a customer is with a particular brand, the
longer the brand stays with him/her. If any company treats its customers in a poor manner or
simply ignore their queries or service emails, then the customers are most likely to change
their brand preferences. This is the major reason, why the companies deliver their customers
with superior services as well as experiences that outperform their competitors. In most of the
cases, the customers tend to connect with the employees of any company, by either visiting
the stores or by talking over phone. This provides the businesses with opportunities for
delivering excellent services to the target consumers.
However, the customer service is one aspect of the customer experiences. In modern
days, the concept of customer experiences has changed to a certain level, at the market place.
It is more than just person to person services and thanks to information technologies, the
companies now can connect with their target consumers, using several platforms. Therefore,
it can be said that customer experiences help in bringing in new ways of strengthening their
relationships, through technical breakthroughs.

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References
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elements of experience quality on the customer-service provider’s relationship. International
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Shopping: A Structural Modeling Approach. Journal of Global Marketing, pp.1-14.
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