ARC: Connections: ELMAR: Posting

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Customer Experience – The next strategic battleground. But, has it found its way into the classroom yet?

Dear colleagues,

The notion of customer experience, and its impact on business, is only now receiving great attention (Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004; Johnston and Clark, 2008). Creating superior customer experiences is now seen as a key objective for service organizations (Verhoef et al., 2009) in their efforts to build customer loyalty (Badgett, Boyce and Kleinberger, 2007). Jerry Gregoire, former CIO of Dell, maintains that “the customer experience is the next competitive battleground”, and representatives of Oracle recently stated that "customer experience management is the next CRM". Managing the customer experience has become a crucial strategic ingredient for service organizations.

Despite the recognition of customer experience by organizations, academic literature investigating the customer experience is still limited (Verhoef et al. 2009). This is a critical challenge when it comes to integrating customer experience management in the curriculum of undergraduate, postgraduate, and executive education courses alike. More and more academics believe that customer experience management will become, or is already a key component of marketing strategy, and need to be integrated in the teaching of marketing strategy and marketing management. However, they struggle to find textbooks and other supplementary literature to design these courses and modules.

And this is where we would like your help. Please share with us your personal thoughts on:

Do you already, or are you planning on teaching Customer Experience and Customer Experience Management on your courses?

If yes, which kind of courses will it be integrated in, e.g. undergraduate courses, postgraduate courses, and/or executive education?

How many students will be enrolled in these programs per year?

What materials are you, or will you be using, i.e. which textbooks, literature, existing slides etc?

Are you willing to share your own material, e.g. slides with other colleagues?

Please be also kind enough to provide us with your contact details and affiliation in order to allow us to share our findings including available teaching material with you.

Your consideration and assistance is highly appreciated and we are very much looking forward to hearing from you.

Yours sincerely

Phil Klaus

Dr Phil Klaus MBA, MRes
Visiting Fellow
Centre for Strategic Marketing and Sales
Cranfield School of Management CMRI
Cranfield University
Cranfield, Bedford
MK43 0AL
England

philipp.klaus@cranfield.ac.uk

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