A CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MODEL FOR THE HEAVY INDUSTRIAL INDUSTRY

Abstract

Customer experience is a well-studied and applied fi eld in B2C environments. Many organizations have reaped the benefi ts for their continuous focus on customer experience and the implementation thereof in their strategies. However, customer experience as a competitive element is highly neglected for B2B environment, and even more so in the heavy industrial industry. For vendors in heavy industry to reap the same benefi ts as their B2C counterparts, they need to understand their customers’ perceptions of customer experience and what the consequences of these are. This study aimed to identify the important antecedents and its relevant measuring criteria of customer experience in the heavy industry from the literature, and then empirically test these in a customer experience model that can be used by the industry. Four antecedents were selected for further investigation; they are trust, commitment, product and service quality, and satisfaction. Questionnaires measured the antecedents of customer experience on a fi ve-point Likert scale. Resultant to the limited senior buyers (customers) in this industry, the population was targeted rather than to draw a sample. Results indicated that antecedents of customer experience in the heavy industry consist of constructs or sub-antecedents which indicate that customer experience, though a process followed by every customer naturally in any industry without thinking about the process,is complicated. Due to the complexity of customer experience, each construct needs to be studied to understand the full impact of customer experience in the heavy industry on buying behavior. Results further indicated that there are signifi cant positive correlations between commitment and trust, and between commitment and service and product quality, but surprisingly, no correlation with satisfaction