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Discovering Touch Points and Customer Experiences Along the Customer

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Discovering Touch Points and Customer Experiences Along the Customer The never-ending story: discovering touch points and customer experiences along the customer journey Daniel Francesco Persigehl, Tobias Vermeer Department of Business Administration Master in Marketing, 2 year program Thesis Course 30 ECTS, Spring 2019 Supervisor: Vladimir Vanyushyn [This page is left intentionally blank] Pretiumque et causa laboris [This page is left intentionally blank] ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We would like to thoroughly express our gratitude to our supervisor, Vladimir Vanyushyn, for his advice and guidance during the construction of our thesis. We would furthermore like to thank the participants that gave their up precious time in their lives to give us the valuable information we needed to complete our thesis. We would finally like to thank our friends and family for their support in what has been a couple of time-consuming, energy-consuming and stress-inducing months. Daniel Persigehl & Tobias Vermeer I [This page is left intentionally blank] ABSTRACT Today’s society is earmarked by developments in technology so drastic, that our lives are continuously changed, impacted and remolded. When thinking about how many impressions one goes through during a single day, the results will be uncountable. And at an increasing pace, many of these impressions are shifting to the digital realm. This thesis acknowledges these rapid changes in the modern world of marketing, particularly the digital aspects of it. Yet while a great amount of research has been conducted to more closely understand digital marketing and how to conduct it, a significantly little amount of research has been spent focusing on the customer. This while the path that a customer takes from need to purchase may have grown to be more complex than ever. Not all the impressions that a customer gains on a certain product or brand come solely from the company behind it. As such, we decided to focus on exploring this customer journey – a relatively nascent theme in the field of marketing research. More specifically, we aim to answer the following research question: How is the customer purchasing decision affected by the customer’s interaction with touch points throughout the customer journey? Our main purpose was to arrive at a model as an answer to the research question, that could be used as a foundation for future research studies. We were intensely curious at gaining a better understanding of the customer journey and what the customers experience as they are touched by different influential channels during their travel from need to purchase. Our study shows that it is possible to synthesize the state of current research on the topic of the customer journey and support it with empirical data gathered from interviews with a variety of customers. Central to our thesis are the following two definitions that we have constructed based on current literature: The customer journey is the individual experience that a customer has when interacting with touch points in the path from a pre-purchase to a post-purchase setting. Touch points are moments of contact between customer and company that individually and collectively influence customer experience. The third critical element is that of the customer experience, which we don’t explicitly define, but implicitly construe as a distinct construct with a powerful impact by serving as the catalyst between touch points and customer actions and perceptions. The result is a conceptual model of the customer journey that we feel could be a foundation for future research on the customer journey to build upon and perhaps one day could serve as an overarching model for marketing as a whole. II TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................. I ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................. II 1. INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................... 1 1.1 The digital state of society .................................................................................... 1 1.2 Digital marketing as a practice and field................................................................ 2 1.3 Problem conceptualization and importance ........................................................... 5 1.4 A closer look at concepts ...................................................................................... 7 1.4.1 Digital touch points ........................................................................................ 8 1.4.2 Defining versus testing ................................................................................... 9 1.4.3 Brand perspective versus purchasing decision perspective .............................. 9 1.4.4 The digital environment ................................................................................ 11 1.5 Research question and purposes .......................................................................... 12 1.6 Concluding remarks ............................................................................................ 13 2. SCIENTIFIC METHODOLOGY ............................................................................. 14 2.1 Research philosophy ........................................................................................... 14 2.1.1 Ontology ...................................................................................................... 14 2.1.2 Epistemology ............................................................................................... 15 2.2 Research approach .............................................................................................. 17 2.3 Concluding remarks ............................................................................................ 18 3. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODOLOGY ..................................................... 19 3.1 Overall methodology .......................................................................................... 19 3.2 Overall delimitations ........................................................................................... 19 3.3 Research strategy ................................................................................................ 20 3.4 Literature review ................................................................................................. 21 3.4.1 Primary literature review .............................................................................. 22 3.4.2 Literature search for customer experience insights ........................................ 22 3.4.3 Literature search for peripheral insights ........................................................ 23 3.4.4 Thematic analysis ......................................................................................... 23 3.5 Interviews ........................................................................................................... 24 3.5.1 First interview segment ................................................................................ 24 3.5.2 Second interview segment ............................................................................ 24 3.5.3 Pre-testing .................................................................................................... 24 3.5.4 Choice of respondents .................................................................................. 25 3.5.5 Interview setting ........................................................................................... 26 3.6 Analysis method ................................................................................................. 28 3.7 Research ethics ................................................................................................... 30 4. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK ............................................................................ 31 4.1 Consumer or customer ........................................................................................ 31 4.2 Literature review ................................................................................................. 31 4.2.1 Defining the customer journey ...................................................................... 32 4.2.2 Defining touch points ................................................................................... 43 4.2.3 Combining the two concepts ......................................................................... 49 4.2.4 Creating the conceptual model ...................................................................... 53 4.3 The role of customer experience ......................................................................... 55 4.3.1 The customer experience is a subjective, emotional response ........................ 55 4.3.2 The customer experience is created through interactions ............................... 57 4.3.3 The customer experience creates value ......................................................... 58 4.3.4 Value created through customer experience drives the customer journey ...... 58 4.3.5 Customer experience transcends individual stages in the customer journey ... 59 4.3.6 Integrating customer experience into the customer journey model ................ 60 4.4 Introducing the purchase decision-process .......................................................... 61 4.4.1 The relevance of the purchasing decision process ......................................... 62 4.4.2 Concluding remarks.....................................................................................
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