Understanding Customer Experience

Temporality is integral to all aspects of consumer behaviour and consumption. At its core, consumption is only about the use of time. In buying a service, we are often motivated by a desire to save ourselves time, such as eating a takeaway rather than cooking or paying someone to clean our house, rather than do so ourselves. In buying an experience, we are concerned with purchasing pleasant moments of time, such as a night out at a favourite restaurant or a relaxing spa day with friends. Even when purchasing physical products, we want to have a “good time”, with them, however, that might be determined by the customer. In all purchases, even those that might be considered unpleasant, such as buying insurance or paying parking fines, we are concerned with minimising the unpleasantness and maximising the enjoyable moments of time. The extent to which our time was used wisely in any consumption purchase is an essential, but often overlooked, ingredient for evaluation of satisfaction. From the very beginnings of trade, when as a species we first encountered the temporal benefits of outsourcing our labour to others, we began our deeply ingrained relationship with time-saving. Although it might not realise it, the long-established and highly profitable service industry owes its success to the desire to optimise temporality. This chapter provides the foundation for understanding customer experience, beginning with discussion of how experiences can be defined and explained. The academic disciplines contributing to the broader domain of consumer behaviour, within which experiential consumptionexperiential consumption sits, are outlined before an overview of the evolution of knowledge of customer experience. This chapter concludes by considering the contemporary customer or consumer, acknowledging some of the characteristics and challenges that emerge in trying to optimise customer experience today and in future.