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The purpose of this paper is to review the literature on customer experience to develop a better understanding of the concept and propose a research agenda.

The paper is based on a thorough review of 69 full-text articles, 12 books and one published dissertation related to customer experience.

The review describes the relevance of experiential perspective, service experience and customer experience to attract, delight and retain customers. Customer experience is regarded as a holistic interactive process, facilitated through cognitive and emotional clues, moderated by customer and contextual characteristics, resulting into unique and pleasurable/un-pleasurable memories. The study provides a deeper understanding of the concept and research issues for customer experience.

It provides important insights into the emergence, development, management and measurement of customer experience-related issues for future research.

Customer experience needs to be considered and managed as a holistic strategic process for creating customer value, differentiation, customer satisfaction, loyalty and competitive advantage.

The study contributes to the understanding of customer experience and research agenda based on a thorough review of literature spanning 25 years.

The opening up of the Indian retail sector has seen a proliferation of the corporate players through different retail formats and stores – the majority being in the food and groceries. This necessitates creating, building, and managing differentiated retail store brands, and image differentiation, to attract and retain shoppers. This research paper attempts to understand whether the Indian consumers differentiate the various store brands and images based on their experiences.

The study was conducted in two stages – list of parameters of evaluation of retail store image (developed from the literature), discussed with middle‐level managers from the retail sector to finalize parameters relevant for store image measurement in the Indian context and a questionnaire evolved for primary data collection, administered to 326 SEC A and B respondents (shoppers of food and grocery from modern retail stores). To assess the store image dimensions perceived by these shoppers, factor analysis was employed and for understanding various store image attributes used for differentiation of store brands one‐way analysis of variance was employed.

Results reflect that Indian shoppers have started identifying the dimensions of retail store image and are differentiating the various stores on the basis of functional attributes. Eventually, the stores would have to create differentiation based on psychological attributes.

The paper is limited to the organised modern food and grocery retail stores of Ahmedabad city.

The paper can be helpful to Indian retail store chains to focus on elements to create a differentiated store image.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a scale for measuring perceived service quality for public hospitals from the user's (patient's) perspective. The objective is to measure perceived service quality of public hospitals.

Standard scale development research procedure recommended by experts was followed. First, literature review of studies to measure service quality was undertaken. Later, Delphi method (two iterations) was used. Interviews were conducted of experts and customers for understanding and generating items for perceived service quality for public hospitals. A survey was then undertaken first for development of the scale and later for validation purpose.

A reliable and valid scale called public hospital service quality (PubHosQual) is developed to measure the five dimensions of hospital service quality: admission, medical service, overall service, discharge process, and social responsibility.

Since, this study was conducted in India only, the generalizability of the PubHosQual scale has to be tested in other countries.

The proposed scale PubHosQual in this study could be used as a diagnostic tool to identity areas where specific improvements are needed, and to pinpoint aspects of the hospital's services that require modification. The paper is an attempt to develop an instrument to incorporate the “voice of the customer.”

Most relevant studies about perceived service quality for public hospitals either do not have stable factor structure or are relying on generic SERVQUAL scale to measure service quality. The new scale fills the gap of absence of a validated scale to measure perceived service quality for public hospitals.