Where does experience collide?

Customer experience is the holistic cognitive, emotional, sensory, and social response a customer has to a firm across the whole journey of touchpoints, before, during, and after purchase. Lemon and Verhoef's 2016 Understanding Customer Experience Throughout the Customer Journey synthesised the field and framed it as a multidimensional response that unfolds over time, building on the experiential turn that Schmitt's 1999 Experiential Marketing began by treating consumption as an experience engaging perception, emotion, thought, action, and social identity rather than a weighing of product features. The referent is a customer's aggregated reaction to a brand over time, tracked by surveys and journey analytics, not a staged commercial offering, a person's use of one device, or the raw fact of conscious awareness.[1][2]

Unit

One customer's overall response to a brand across the journey

Recovery means

Service recovery, a firm's response to a failed encounter, can partly restore a damaged experience

Measured by

Captured by customer surveys, satisfaction and loyalty metrics, and journey mapping across touchpoints

In the experience economy an experience is a distinct economic offering, as different from a service as a service is from a good: the firm stages a memorable event and charges for the time and engagement the customer gives to it. Pine and Gilmore's 1998 article Welcome to the Experience Economy and their 1999 book The Experience Economy argued that as goods and services become commoditised, businesses compete by staging experiences, using work as theatre and the offering as a performance. The referent is a priced offering that a business designs and sells, counted in revenue and margin, not one customer's private response to a brand, a person's use of a system, or the philosophical fact of conscious life.[3][4]

Unit

One staged, priced experiential offering sold by a firm

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Assessed by what customers will pay for the staged event and by the revenue and margin it earns

User experience is a person's perceptions and responses that result from the use or anticipated use of an interactive product or system, spanning usability, emotion, aesthetics, and meaning rather than task efficiency alone. Hassenzahl and Tractinsky's 2006 User experience - a research agenda drew the field together and argued that experience with technology is subjective, situated, and shaped by the user's expectations and feelings, not only by whether the interface works. The referent is an individual's momentary and cumulative reaction to interacting with a designed artefact, studied through user testing and self-report, not a brand-wide customer response, a business's staged offering, or bare conscious awareness.[5]

Unit

One person's response to using an interactive system

Recovery means

Error recovery, how easily a user regains control after a mistake, is one usability aspect within it

Measured by

Studied through usability testing, questionnaires, and self-report of feeling and satisfaction

In philosophy of mind, experience is conscious mental life itself: the subjective, felt character of a mental state, the fact that there is something it is like for a subject to undergo it. Nagel's 1974 What Is It Like to Be a Bat? made this meaning central by arguing that an organism has conscious experience if there is something it is like to be that organism, a subjective quality that no purely physical description seems to capture. The referent is the raw first-person quality of awareness, the target of theories of consciousness, not a customer's reaction to a brand, a firm's staged offering, or a user's response to a device.[6]

Unit

The felt, first-person quality of a conscious mental state

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Approached through introspective report and philosophical argument rather than direct measurement