MBA Update: Customer Experience Management

The final two classes in the digital marketing concentration of my MBA program were a class on customer experience management and one on digital marketing strategy. The customer experience (CX) class was especially helpful to look at every aspect of business from the customer’s point of view.

Course Description

Marketing has become increasingly focused on the ‘customer experience’. Customer experience is the flow of emotions and beliefs the customer experiences in the entire process from information search to purchase and consumption. Effective digital brand builders recognize that they need to move beyond customer satisfaction with selective aspects of a digital service to focus on the holistic nature of customer experiences across the purchase cycle. The customer experience perspective also recognizes that need to understand consumer decision-making process. This course covers major topics in models of consumer decision-making, applications of consumer psychology in the digital world, services marketing perspectives, digital service quality, customer journey mapping, channel optimization and customer experience metrics.

Case Studies and Books

Cases: Starbucks Loyalty Reigns (again), Sephora Direct

The New Science of Customer Emotions

Course Goals

The essential objective of this course is to equip students to work on improving the resonance of brands in the digital environments through relevance, fit and engagement. The course aims to provide students with the skills to increase customer engagement with the products and services of digital brands.  Articles and case studies are used to illustrate how these concepts operate within the digital marketplace. The course starts with the introduction of customer experience (CX), models of consumer decision-making and progresses to models of digital services, service evaluation (satisfaction and service quality), the omnichannel experience and designing customer journey maps and performance metrics. Students will engage in weekly discussion of case studies and article, a course project involving developing a customer journey map, evaluating consumers at each point along the journey and designing metrics to institutionalize the process.

By the end of this course, students will be able to:

• Systematically analyze digital consumer decision-making situations using the appropriate models of consumer decision-making from information search to the purchase funnel to consumption.
• Design a customer journey map that comprehensively captures the customer experience.
• Design measure of digital customer satisfaction and service quality.
• Design, track and distribute a dashboard of digital customer experience metrics.

A Few Lessons

1. A customer journey map was the main group project for the course. What is a customer journey map?
2. Customer Experience Failure – A Case of AOL
3. Consumer Decision Making in the Digital Environment
4. Services Marketing and Emotion
5. Digital Market Research
6. Consumer Psychology: Making Decisions Easier

I started an online MBA at Montclair State University in January 2017 and will graduate in February 2019.