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In a world where customer empowerment is continuously increasing and changing the service landscape, retailers must provide memorable shopping experiences to retain and attract new customers. When customers decide to go shopping in physical stores, they expect to enjoy their visit, experiencing cognitive, affective, social, and physical responses evoked by in-store stimuli. The purpose of this paper is to propose and validate a scale to measure in-store customer experience (ISCX).

This study’s theoretical review of customer experience (CX) demonstrates that a formative model provides the best structure for measuring the construct ISCX. Furthermore, the study follows the guidelines for rigorous construction of a formative scale, which include three main stages: generation of items, scale purification, and assessment of scale validity and reliability.

The results provide evidence that a formative third-order scale with a reflective second-order dimension (social experience) and three reflective first-order dimensions (cognitive, affective, and physical experience) has satisfactory psychometric properties. The findings also provide useful information on the effect of the ISCX scale on key performance variables such as satisfaction and loyalty to the store.

The ISCX scale proposed constitutes a useful multi-concept diagnostic tool for use by retailers to create fully experiential shopping environments with differential value for the customer. By providing a complete, robust, precise measure of CX in a retail environment, the scale gives researchers a structured way to examine the causes and consequences of CX in retail.

This study aims to examine the trends and themes in the field of customer experience using a bibliometric analysis between 1957 and 2017.

The paper analyses 1,767 papers selected from Web of Science (WoS) database using VOS Viewer software tool to create bibliometric networks. The results of the study were classified under the following bibliometric indicators: evaluation of the number of studies analyzed; most cited documents; most influential authors; and highly influential journals, institutions and countries with the highest productivity. Additionally, the paper also presents three co-citation studies analyzing most co-cited references, first authors and journals.

Authors and institutes from the American and European countries dominate the contribution to the development of the field. The presence of Asian countries signifies the rising importance being given to the research field. The findings establish the argument that most of the ideas that follow today in the development of the field are mostly sourced from the works published in highly reputed journals. Co-citation analysis indicates the presence of multi-disciplinarity in the research field with journals representing different research areas such as management, strategy and psychology.

The papers analyzed in the study were retrieved only from the WoS. Furthermore, the precise number of clusters obtained during the analysis depends on the parameter set by the authors which is subjective. Researchers are encouraged to draw further insights by manipulating the parameter criteria.

The findings in the study can be used to enrich the understanding of customer experience and future research on the topic.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is one of the first comprehensive papers offering a general overview of the leading trends in the field over a period of 60 years.

The purpose of this paper is to review customer experience formation (CXF) by first locating and analyzing how researchers approach CXF in the service literature and the theoretical underpinnings of these approaches, and then assessing which approaches are best suited for understanding, facilitating, and examining CXF in today’s service landscape.

This study systematically reviews 163 articles published between 1998 and 2015 in the service field.

This study illustrates how researchers approach CXF on the individual level by applying stimulus- interaction- or sense-making-based perspectives. These reflect researchers’ theoretical underpinnings for how individuals realize the customer experience within environmental, social, and temporal contexts through intermediation. Researchers further apply contextual lenses, including the dyadic and service- or customer-ecosystem lenses, which reflect their theoretical underpinnings for explaining how various actor constellations and contextual boundaries frame individual-level CXF. Finally, this study shows why the sense-making-based perspective, together with a service- or customer-ecosystem lens, is particularly suitable for approaching complex CXF in today’s service settings.

To advance theory, researchers should choose the approaches resonant with their research problem and worldview but also consider that today’s complex service landscape favors holistic and systemic approaches over atomistic and dyadic ones.

This study provides managers with recommendations for understanding, facilitating, and evaluating contemporary CXF.

This study advances the understanding of CXF by systematically reviewing its multiple layers, approaches, and dimensions and the opportunities and challenges of each approach.

With the considerable attention given to customer experience (CX) today, customer experience management (CXM) has been touted as one of the most promising management approaches for organizations. The purpose of this paper is threefold: develop a scale to measure the CXM construct, investigate the financial outcomes of CXM and assess the impact of moderator variables (e.g. market turbulence) on these financial outcomes while accounting for the effects of control variables (e.g. firm size).

The study involves a survey of 233 firms (across 10 industries) involved in CXM. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), structural equation modeling (SEM), instrumental variables and moderated regression analyzes are used to test four hypotheses.

The results support treating CXM as a second-order construct comprising three dimensions: cultural mindset toward CXs, strategic directions for designing CXs and firm capabilities of continually renewing CXs. Furthermore, CXM is positively related to financial performance; this effect increases as market turbulence, competitive intensity and technological turbulence increases.

With our CXM measure, future research can advance CXM theory by examining other outcome variables (e.g. employee satisfaction) and moderators (e.g. culture), as well as introduce antecedents to CXM (e.g. company heritage). Limitations include the concerns normally associated with using self-reported measures of performance, convenience samples and cross-sectional designs.

This research provides managerial prescriptions of when to invest in CXM initiatives to enhance financial performance. It also provides managers a CXM diagnostic to help assess their level of CXM maturity.

This paper develops CXM theory by advancing a measure of the CXM construct, relating the construct to an outcome variable (main effect) and introducing moderating variables to shed light on the generalizability of the main effect.

This paper’s objective is to raise awareness of how customer experience (CX) research, a key construct of modern-day service research, needs to be revisited in view of the pandemic. Particularly, we examine whether CX-related service research constructs, models and frameworks need to be reevaluated during and after the Corona crisis and if so, how and why? Moreover, this paper contributes to CX research by analyzing the customer mindset from three perspectives: emotions, employment and expectations (EEE).

We critically review current CX practices and investigate the impact on how customers perceive services in this time of crisis.

Based on this critical analysis, we discuss implications for research and practice with reference to the example of the luxury industry with its historical emphasis on the CX. This discussion leads to related propositions and research directions through Corona and beyond.

We investigate the current customer mindset in more detail, which we divide into three main themes: emotions, employment and expectations (EEE).

Offline retail stores have been working on improving their in-store customer experience; they have begun to realise the physical advantage they have over online channels. Especially sports products have a number of unique features, such as high emotional involvement or a sense of community; additionally, sports customers put emphasis on multisensory brand experience at the point of sale. This study examines the in-store customer experience (ISCX) in offline sports retail stores, taking into account the commercial uniqueness of sport.

A qualitative study (focus groups; n = 16) and quantitative survey (cross-sectional survey design; n = 238) were conducted to measure ISCX in sports retail stores.

The results suggest that the customers' in-store experience has a significant influence on customers' satisfaction with the sports retailer and their likeliness to recommend the store to friends, which, in turn, is significantly affected by customers' satisfaction with the retailer. Moreover, social responses to actors involved in the service encounter, for example, the interaction with employees, play a significant role for the customer in-store experience. Accordingly, sports customers strive not only for functional benefits inherent in the interaction with customers and employees but also for social benefits.

This study extends the knowledge by (1) replicating the ISCX scale, (2) analysing ISCX in a sports retail environment and (3) examining the influence of ISCX on the Net Promoter Score. Moreover, the findings support managers' know-how about in-store setting and help to maintain the customer relationship.

The purpose of this paper is to look into the topic of IP category extensions in an entertainment setting. The main goal of the study is to explore the reciprocal spillover effect of customer experience (CX) ratings with an intellectual property (IP) in one medium (i.e. film) on the sales of the same IP in other media (i.e. comic books).

The study is based on 21-years of monthly top 300 comic book direct market sales data linked to the release schedule and domestic box office gross figures for films featuring Marvel and DC comic book IP appearing in the weekly top 50 films over the same time period. The analysis is based on a hierarchical linear (i.e. mixed) model to account for the nested structure of the data.

The analysis reveals that CX ratings of weekly top 50 films featuring comic book IP have a quadratic relationship with comic book sales by the two major publishers. Films receiving very good but not excellent ratings are associated with the highest levels of incremental comic book sales.

The model is based on sales of periodical comic books in the direct market only (i.e. specialty shops) and does not account for sales of digital comics or collected editions through other channels. The analysis is also limited to IP for the two major publishers (Marvel and DC comics).

This study expands current knowledge on CX spillover effects between different media, contributing to entertainment and CX-literature alike.

The needs of CMOs to utilize a firm's data productively in order to support decision-making combined with the reported benefits of enterprise feedback management solutions has resulted in a rapid rise in usage and valuation of EFM providers. The explicit promise of EFM providers is improved financial performance, whereas there is no scientific research investigating this link. To investigate the link between EFM usage and financial performance is core of this research.

To gain insight into this link survey data from 127 US-based firms on their usage of EFM platforms was linked to their stock market performance over several years.

This research did not find any significant positive relationships between different aspects of EFM usage investigated and stock returns. It is important to note that these results should not be taken as validation that EFM systems do not result in positive financial outcomes for firms. It may be that superior market performance as measured through stock returns is difficult to observe through a cross-sectional analysis. Instead these results indicate that superior market performance as measured through stock market performance is not an obvious, generalizable outcome for firms that have adopted EFM systems.

EFM has rapidly grown across many consumer facing industries, with EFM platform providers receiving very high market valuations on relatively small revenue streams. This is one of the first scientific papers to study the usage and impact of these EFM systems.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a step-by-step text mining analysis roadmap (TMAR) for service researchers. The paper provides guidance on how to choose between alternative tools, using illustrative examples from a range of business contexts.

The authors provide a six-stage TMAR on how to use text mining methods in practice. At each stage, the authors provide a guiding question, articulate the aim, identify a range of methods and demonstrate how machine learning and linguistic techniques can be used in practice with illustrative examples drawn from business, from an array of data types, services and contexts.

At each of the six stages, this paper demonstrates useful insights that result from the text mining techniques to provide an in-depth understanding of the phenomenon and actionable insights for research and practice.

There is little research to guide scholars and practitioners on how to gain insights from the extensive “big data” that arises from the different data sources. In a first, this paper addresses this important gap highlighting the advantages of using text mining to gain useful insights for theory testing and practice in different service contexts.