Customer Experience Quality Phil Klaus Doctoral Student February, 2009 PK My name is Phil Klaus, I am a PhD student at Cranfield University School of Management. I chose Cranfield University for a particular reason – not only is it one of the best business schools in the country, it also has a reputation for managerial applications. Meaning that we create research and knowledge that managers can put into action. Tools that will actually help to increase organisational performance. The background of my research comes from my managerial background, so to say, because as a manager I was always in the position to receive advice about what it is that customers do and why they do what they do. As an organisation, as a manager, I was interested to find out why do customers actually purchase or choose my service over another provider. In order to find that out, we encountered a lot of matrices, measurements, that promised to do exactly that – find out why people purchase. So we have got measurements of service quality and customer satisfaction. You probably, just like I, encounter these little surveys that you find when you come into a hotel room or after you purchase a car. However, all these measurements and all this data collected has a major flaw that we find out. It never connects to behaviour, its asks people about intentions of behaviour and as we all know there is a big discrepancy between what we say we are going to do – meaning what we intend to do – and what we actually do. There are a lot of moderating factors that come in between that we don’t think about. So the purpose of my research is to connect what customers do, their behaviour with a measurement because actions, purchases, customer actions. If they buy that is what drives profit for the organisation, not brands, customer satisfaction or quality of service. In the background you see the London Eye, one of the landmarks of London and a lot of people would think of this in particular about customer experience. Why? Because it has an experiential part to it. But customer experience is not about experience or experiential. It’s not going to the Shakespeare Globe and enjoying a great play or going to the movie theatre and seeing something great, or going to a great restaurant and enjoying a meal. It’s about why do people choose your offerings? Why do they purchase your products, your services? Apple is a perfect example of a customer driven brand. Why? Let’s take a look at the background. We have got here the Apple Store on Regent Street – one of the retail landmarks of London and it is a particularly great example of why. Apple choose to go for the most complex and most expensive distribution channel. They choose retail stores. Why? Everybody else would say ‘oh, my God, please don’t do it’. But the only thing that Apple is interested in is delivering a great customer experience. And everyone who has ever been in a store will agree with me that they actually do. Regarding the impact that experience quality will have for your organisation and for working with us here at Cranfield University at this kind of research, you not only can determine why your customers buy preferably again and again and again, but you can cater your offerings to their customer experience. Therefore you can acquire and keep your most valuable customers, which is an incredibly powerful tool. And because the scale is dynamic, meaning you measure it constantly, and on the basis that you can see changes in behaviour, you will have a sustainable competitive advantage over your competitors.