Great (customer) ex­pe­ri­ences: what it takes from a firm to develop them?

Companies that conduct business in this sector can produce service experiences that better match people's lives and provide value by investigating customers‘s expectations and emotions and by training staff in human-centered design. Knowing the desires of the customers better enables businesses to customise their offering to those needs and maintain their market's competitive position. This is possible only if employees have the right skill set to uncover what customers really want and how they feel. According to the study conducted, a customer's inner motives and personal preferences are tied to their decision to purchase a leisure activity. 

Know your customer, train your staff 

The study revealed that motivations to purchase one of the service experiences from the case organisation are related to three main goals: having a good time with a loved one for a special occasion; wanting to escape from stress and routine; pursuing a hobby or watching the favourite sport. The ideal example of an experience offering where clients are motivated by their desire to spend quality time with a loved one, is the purchase of a theatre ticket paired with a hotel stay in one of the liveliest capitals of Europe. Customers who engaged with such experiences felt that the overall time spent in the activity was way longer than the actual one. This is particularly true when businesses manage to deliver offerings that are immersive, entertaining, and that contain elements of aesthetics, education and escapism. Researching customers’ desires is not enough though. From the firm perspective employees’ knowledge and skills in human-centered design are fundamental to develop great customer experiences. Performing qualitative research, employing design at an early stage in service development and mapping the customer journey are the most important methods to be implemented in organisations, among others.

 The customer centric approach: the way to reveal customer needs

Since COVID-19 had heavily hit the travel and leisure industry, topics like human-centricity and designing great customer experiences have become fundamental to keep an edge in the marketplace and attract new customers. Using a customer-centric approach like talking directly to the customers, empathising with them, and learning about their travel habits and their free time, Frisicale uncovered their behaviours, needs and challenges. Because one of the experience offerings of the case company wasn’t performing as wished, in her thesis Frisicale investigated first how the employees were working between each other to create experience packages for the customers. Having understood that customers were not fully put at the centre of the service development and that most information about the customers were assumption-based, she then proceeded to research the real needs and emotions of the customers. By doing so, she gained evidence of what customers were looking to do in their free time and what they wished to have in the company service experiences. By sharing the results from the customer research and bringing the employees together in a room Frisicale aimed at reaching a shared understanding among stakeholders of who the customers really were. The shared understanding of customers among employees was just the start of creating an awareness process on the importance of conducting research on the field for the benefit of the firm. This led her to investigate broadly what other practices in the business are already implemented to enhance customer experience and what internal processes and methods could be improved internally. 

Background 

The Master’s Thesis was written by Francesca A. Frisicale during the year of 2022, utilising a case study research approach. The case company was based in the European region and the study was conducted in a transnational context which provided both interesting setting and challenges while pursuing the work like cross-cultural aspects and remote field research. The approach taken in the research was determined by Frisicale's enthusiasm for human-centered design and her prior experience in this area. Service and Customer dominant logics together with theories of the experience economy, experience capabilities and customer centric organisation constitute the theoretical background for development. The study was carried out following the design process model by the British Design Council, chosen because it is still the most simple and straightforward method of explaining the design process to non-design stakeholders. Service design methods and tools were adopted because they are effective at sparking discussion among the relevant parties, they also help establishing a shared understanding of any discoveries that may result from fieldwork. Ultimately, the methodology aids in the collaborative investigation and development of solutions.

Read Francesca’s thesis How to design successful (customer) experiences in the travel industry - Theseus. 

Further information

Francesca A. Frisicale 

MBA in Service Innovation and Design 

francesca.frisicale@gmail.com