Internet Learning Volume 5, Number 1, Fall 2016/Winter 2017 | Page 20

An Academy Customer Experience Benchmark Observation
tomer has become a product or service
advocate.
Beyond customer satisfaction
and Net Promoter Score is to understand
what is most important to the
customer regarding the interactions.
For example, what type of interactions
do practitioner doctoral faculty members
require to help them become more
competent researchers? Doctoral faculty
should be actively engaged in striving
to be published in specific journals increasing
their recognition, contributing
to body of knowledge, and improving
the reputation of the institution, the
goal of distributing knowledge (Bleiklie
& Powell, 2005).
Maklan and Klaus (2011) suggest
that customers take a longitudinal approach
when thinking about their experiences
and can believe that they have
experience with a company even before
making a purchase based on advertising
and word of mouth, for example. Experience
is the cumulative interactions
few studies have documented. “Market
researchers need to develop an appropriate
measure for the concept of customer
experience” (p. 778). Depending
on the product or service, adjustments
in measuring must be considered.
Maklan and Klaus (2011) investigated
the customer experience of
those shopping for a mortgage. They
developed a measure for customer experience
quality. (Using a four-point
scale-developing paradigm: categorizing
the domain of service, the types
of experiences, refining the scale for
reliability and validity, and finally providing
an explanation of satisfaction
perceptions, repeat purchase, word of
mouth, and loyalty.) The study culminated
in a scale specifically designed
for mortgage offering and its customers
dubbed POMP, a measurement of
Product experience, Outcome focus,
Moments of truth, and Peace of mind.
“Our findings demonstrate significantly
stronger relationships between customer
experience quality and loyalty,
as defined in this study, than between
customer satisfaction and loyalty” (p.
783). As noted later, loyalty can also
demonstrate advocacy among products
and services.
According to Tucker (2012), customer
commitment is most important
(as cited in Bean & Van Tyne, 2012).
“Measuring a customers’ level of commitment
is to gauge what J.D. Power
and Associates calls stickiness ...” (p. 4).
This stickiness refers to continue use
of the company’s products or services
based on the interactions with a company
along the customer experience
continuum. As products and services
are offered to help doctoral chairs and
students partake in learning how to
disseminate and publish their own research,
understanding the emotional
connection of the customer personas
can help create a stronger product or
service emotional bond and move the
customer to tiers 2 and 3 of the CX continuum
(Miaskiewicz & Kozar, 2011).
Earlier experience management
researchers have applied a similar stickiness
but peculiar term dubbed sticktion.
“In the context of experience management,
it refers to a limited number
of special clues that are sufficiently re-
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