Customer Experience: An Emerging Source of Sustainable Competitive Advantage

Abstract

In an ever growing dynamic marketing environment, customer experience is becoming the new age differentiator. There has been a paradigm shift from building “product brands” to “strong customer relationships based on improvised service quality” to “creation and management of compelling customer experiences”. Customer experience sees customers as beyond rational beings seeking fulfillment of their emotional, hedonic and sensory aspirations. Given the fact that customer experience (whether good, bad or indifferent) arises in the course of the interactions that he/ she has with the organization across multiple touch points during the entire customer lifecycle and has the potential of a possible influence on other related aspects of customer satisfaction, customer loyalty etc., makes it an interesting field of study and further research and an attractive proposition for leading edge companies to develop it as a source of building a sustainable competitive advantage in the advent of excessive commoditization.