Understanding Customer Experience Throughout the Customer Journey
2016/06/16 by Katherine N. Lemon, Peter C. Verhoef · 5,324 citations
Business, Management and Accounting · Social Sciences · #Business #Consumer Retail Behavior Studies #Customer Service Quality and Loyalty #Customer advocacy #Customer delight #Customer equity #Customer experience #Customer intelligence #Customer retention #Customer to customer #Digital Marketing and Social Media #Marketing #Service (business) #Service quality #Voice of the customer
paper · open access · doi:10.1509/jm.15.0420
published in Journal of Marketing 80(6), 69-96 (SAGE Publishing)
openalex publication_date 2016/06/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
Abstract
Understanding customer experience and the customer journey over time is critical for firms. Customers now interact with firms through myriad touch points in multiple channels and media, and customer experiences are more social in nature. These changes require firms to integrate multiple business functions, and even external partners, in creating and delivering positive customer experiences. In this article, the authors aim to develop a stronger understanding of customer experience and the customer journey in this era of increasingly complex customer behavior. To achieve this goal, they examine existing definitions and conceptualizations of customer experience as a construct and provide a historical perspective of the roots of customer experience within marketing. Next, they attempt to bring together what is currently known about customer experience, customer journeys, and customer experience management. Finally, they identify critical areas for future research on this important topic.
Citations
Cited by
- Marketing in the Sharing Economy
- Creating Effective Online Customer Experiences
- Charting the Path to Purchase Using Topic Models
- Is fintech chatbot adoption a far-off aspiration? Establishing adoption model using ISM-MICMAC approach
- Artificial empathy in marketing interactions: Bridging the human-AI gap in affective and social customer experience
- Effective customer journey design: consumers’ conception, measurement, and consequences
- The value relevance of digital marketing capabilities to firm performance
- Promoting product returns? The impact of at-purchase and post-purchase discounts on customers’ return behavior
- Artificial intelligence versus human service agents: How their presence shapes consumer information privacy concerns
- Understanding Customer Responses to AI-Driven Personalized Journeys: Impacts on the Customer Experience
- A systematic review of virtual reality in tourism and hospitality: The known and the paths to follow
- Digital transformation: A multidisciplinary reflection and research agenda
- Frontline encounters of the AI kind: An evolved service encounter framework
- Two decades of customer experience research in hospitality and tourism: A bibliometric analysis and thematic content analysis
- Chatbots in customer service within banking and finance: Do chatbots herald the start of an AI revolution in the corporate world?
- Exploring the role of decision-making factors in international student marketing engagement
- Augmenting user experience in the AI-transitioned metaverse: The role of knowledge management in socio-economic inclusion
- Designing conceptual articles: four approaches
- What's in a Name? Nominal Scaffolding and the Psychological Infrastructure of Shared Market Cognition
- Domain-independent generation and classification of behavior traces
- Digital marketing: A framework, review and research agenda
- Virtual-physical alliance in the metaverse ecosystem: Business model evolution and optimal deployment of knowledge management strategy
- Transforming the Customer Experience through New Technologies
- Marketing comes to its senses: a bibliometric review and integrated framework of sensory experience in marketing
- Understanding the telehealth access through an intersectional lens: Experience of Mandarin-speaking consumers accessing health services from a tertiary hospital in Australia
- Positive Emotions During Search Engine Use: How You Feel Impacts What You Search for and Click On
- Micro-Influencers as Catalysts for Brand Building: Transforming B2B Marketing Strategies in the Digital Age
- Easter eggs: Signaling quality via intrinsic motivation
- Winning your customers’ minds and hearts: Disentangling the effects of lock-in and affective customer experience on retention
- When the road is rocky: Investigating the role of vulnerability in consumer journeys
- Information behaviour in high risk decision making: Study of international postgraduates
- Unpacking dimensions of brand humanization in the Metaverse Era
- Consumers and Artificial Intelligence: An Experiential Perspective
- The psychological and behavioral consequences of customer empowerment in new product development: Situational framework, review, and research agenda
- Digital Transformation and Environmental Sustainability: A Review and Research Agenda
- Alice in Wonderland: Consumer Peril in Navigating the Antipoverty Service Ecosystem
- Addressing Barriers to Mental Health Wellness: Prescriptions for Marketing
- Can augmented reality satisfy consumers' need for touch?
- What Makes a Sale? Simulating End-to-End Seller--Buyer Retail Dynamics with LLM Agents
- The way out – Customer benefits and self-service satisfaction in cashierless shopping systems
- Engaging and retaining customers with AI and employee service
- User journey method: a case study for improving digital intervention use measurement
- Setting the future of digital and social media marketing research: Perspectives and research propositions
- Designing for All: Consumer Response to Inclusive Design
- Customer experience: fundamental premises and implications for research
- Digital transformation and customer value creation in Made in Italy SMEs: A dynamic capabilities perspective
- Customer experiences in the age of artificial intelligence
- What is augmented reality marketing? Its definition, complexity, and future
- Determinants of the intention of smartphone usage by mobile internet users for m-services
- Enhancing appeal of aggregate payment framing: effects of temporal payment framing and goal proximity on consumer purchase decisions
- Analysis of Customer Journeys Using Prototype Detection and Counterfactual Explanations for Sequential Data
- Emerging digital technologies and consumer decision-making in retail sector: Towards an integrative conceptual framework
- Addressing vulnerability in customer experience with AI-agents
- Reshaping the contexts of online customer engagement behavior via artificial intelligence: A conceptual framework
- Meta-analyzing the antecedents of consumers’ shopping decisions in the omnichannel era
- Omnichannel Customer Behavior: Key Drivers of Technology Acceptance and Use and Their Effects on Purchase Intention. [europepmc]
- An Ecological Approach to Smart Homes for Health Care Services: Conceptual Framework of a Smart Servicescape Wheel. [europepmc]
- A Patient-Centered Information System (myED) for Emergency Care Journeys: Design, Development, and Initial Adoption. [europepmc]
- The roles of stakeholder experience and organizational learning in declining mass drug administration coverage for lymphatic filariasis in Port-au-Prince, Haiti: A case study. [europepmc]
- The Feasibility of Connecting Conversations: A Narrative Method to Assess Experienced Quality of Care in Nursing Homes from the Resident's Perspective. [europepmc]
- Mapping the Patient's Journey in Healthcare through Process Mining. [europepmc]
- Embedding the Pillars of Quality in Health Information Technology Solutions Using "Integrated Patient Journey Mapping" (IPJM): Case Study. [europepmc]
- Pandemics and marketing: insights, impacts, and research opportunities. [europepmc]
- Online Consumer Satisfaction During COVID-19: Perspective of a Developing Country. [europepmc]
- COVID-19 and hospitality 5.0: Redefining hospitality operations. [europepmc]
- Online Customer Experience Leads to Loyalty via Customer Engagement: Moderating Role of Value Co-creation. [europepmc]
- The influence of customer trust and artificial intelligence on customer engagement and loyalty - The case of the home-sharing industry. [europepmc]
- How attachment affects users' continued use intention of tourism mobile platform: A user experience perspective. [europepmc]
- Does the Personality of Consumers Influence the Assessment of the Experience of Interaction with Social Robots? [europepmc]
- Pleasure of paying when using mobile payment: Evidence from EEG studies. [europepmc]
- Research trends, developments, and future perspectives in brand attitude: A bibliometric analysis utilizing the Scopus database (1944-2021). [europepmc]
- Emotional Valence from Facial Expression as an Experience Audit Tool: An Empirical Study in the Context of Opera Performance. [europepmc]
- Exploring Customer Journeys in the Context of Dentistry: A Case Study. [europepmc]
- The never-ending patient journey of chronically ill patients: A qualitative case study on touchpoints in relation to patient-centered care. [europepmc]
- Eye Tracking in Virtual Reality: a Broad Review of Applications and Challenges. [europepmc]
- Enhancing Prostate Cancer Diagnosis with a Novel Artificial Intelligence-Based Web Application: Synergizing Deep Learning Models, Multimodal Data, and Insights from Usability Study with Pathologists. [europepmc]
- Key Predictors of Patient Satisfaction and Loyalty in Saudi Healthcare Facilities: A Cross-Sectional Analysis. [europepmc]
- Empirical Insights into Eye-Tracking for Design Evaluation: Applications in Visual Communication and New Media Design. [europepmc]
- From Burden to Enjoyment: A User-Centered Approach to Engage Adolescents in Intensive Longitudinal Research. [europepmc]
- Assessing patient satisfaction with practitioner communication: patient-centered care, hospital environment and patient trust in the public hospitals. [europepmc]
Related