Focus: Customer Experience

The term customer experience has been a buzz word in marketing science and practice for some time now. "Customer experiences result from a customer's reaction to certain stimuli from the company before, during and after the purchase of a product or service." (Bruhn & Hadwich, 2012). The concept of customer experience encompasses both emotional reactions in the form of customer experiences and cognitive processes with regard to the experiences that customers have. For companies, triggering positive customer experiences has now become a key issue/requirement. This is the subject area addressed by the "Customer Experience" focus area at the Department of Marketing. In addition to dealing with customer experience as a marketing science concept, there is a particular research interest in the field of online shopping experience.

Topics on the following issues are particularly welcome:

Questions in the area of general customer experience:

• What is an experience anyway (from the consumer's point of view) or what is understood or perceived as an experience from the consumer's point of view?
• How can customer experiences be measured empirically?

Questions in the area of online shopping experience:

• How do consumers form expectations of a product that they order online?
• What happens to customer expectations in the time between forming expectations and delivery of the product?
• How can consumer expectations of products in online shopping be specifically aligned with (product) reality (e.g. presentation of products in the online store)?
• How are returns perceived by consumers due to unfulfilled expectations (returns experience) and how do they affect customer loyalty (e.g. word-of-mouth, repurchase)?
• How are selected measures to prevent returns perceived in relation to the returns experience?

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