From captive to captivating: The new customer journey model for companies
Abstract
From purely transactional to personalised and unique, customer experiences can extend far beyond the exchange of goods. Companies often focus on functional and transactional experiences because they are the easiest to understand. A large part of purchase behaviour is, however, subjective and occurs in the context of the emotional relationship between companies and their customers. Together, Wharton Customer Analytics (WCA) and C Space explored and quantified the strength of this customer–company relationship while identifying the commercial benefits of customer-centricity (Customer Experience Code). Using the simple clustering method, k-means, WCA led the process of identifying discrete levels of customer-centricity and C Space augmented the analysis with new data on 160 companies. Together, WCA and C Space observed a significant relationship between the measure of a company’s customer-centricity and its performance. In addition, this study proposed a novel company journey framework, in which companies evolve from having a highly transactional customer relationship to one that is emotionally relevant and, crucially, provides the levers for improving customer-centricity. The framework also links this journey to the more typical customer satisfaction metric, net promoter score (NPS), and other measures of word-of-mouth (eg earned advocacy score [EAS]). A recent illustration of this journey is the surprising transformation of the logistics industry, which saw a large gain in emotional connections between 2019 and 2020. UPS, specifically, positively traversed all emotional categories and grew from the bottom to the top in less than a year. The data reveals that UPS’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic illustrated to their customers they are much more than a parcel delivery service.
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Author's Biography
Sophia Tannir is a Data Scientist at C Space. She holds a bachelor’s degree in statistical and data sciences and economics. She completed a research assistantship at Smith College working with baseball statistics, and her main interests lie in statistical modelling and data ethics.
Michael Dupin is the Head of Data Science at C Space. With nearly 20 years’ experience in analytics and data, he is a self-confessed analytics geek, statistician, researcher, modeller, author, and sailor. Michael held various roles within banking where he led efforts such as macroeconomic stress testing and model validation. He was a research fellow at Harvard University studying blood flow in tumours. He holds degrees in nuclear physics and instrumentation and a PhD in computational fluid dynamics.
Manila Austin leads IP research innovation at C Space where she developed a framework and methodology for linking customer-centricity to loyalty, profit and growth (CXC). With over 20 years’ experience, her academic and applied research explores the power of relationships to transform business: working from the inside out through culture, team and leadership development, and from the outside in by strengthening companies’ connection to their customers.
Christina Stahlkopf was the Associate Director for research at C Space and Interbrand Group during the course of the work described in this paper. She has spent more than fifteen years delivering human insights across an array of industries from Fortune 500 companies to international non-governmental organisations and government agencies. Christina holds a PhD in sociology from Oxford University. She is now based at Hasbro.
Raghu Iyengar is a Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is also faculty Director of Wharton Customer Analytics, the world’s pre-eminent academic research centre focusing on the practice of data-driven business decision making. Raghu’s research interests are in pricing and social networks, and his teaching interests are in market research and analytics. His pricing work focuses on the impact of multipart pricing schemes on consumer response.
Citation
Tannir, Sophia, Dupin, Michael, Austin, Manila, Stahlkopf, Christina and Iyengar, Raghu (2022, March 1). From captive to captivating: The new customer journey model for companies. In the Applied Marketing Analytics: The Peer-Reviewed Journal, Volume 7, Issue 4. https://doi.org/10.69554/VVVV9960.
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