Abstract
The digital customer experience is a top priority and major challenge for luxury service companies, who have to connect with their target customers yet strive to remain exclusive and to innovate their core offers while preserving their heritage. After a brief review of the literature on customer experience and virtual environments in luxury service contexts, this chapter focuses on e-servicescapes as a means for innovation and improvement in delivering omnichannel experiences for luxury customers. Adopting Bitner's typology of servicescapes, this chapter is based on a three case vignettes analysis that highlights how luxury service providers can use e-servicescapes to enrich their physical service experiences. Three e-servicescape strategies are identified—integration, amplification, and substitution—that ultimately support companies in renewing and improving their overall luxury propositions.
Top2. Customer Experience In Luxury Service Contexts
The concept of customer experience grounds its roots in the 1980s, when the literature on consumer behavior was rapidly growing, and offered a new, original view of customers as feelers and emotional human beings, beyond just rational decision-makers only caring about a product’s functional benefits. Customer experiences thus encompass the role of emotions in consumption behavior and can be defined as a subjective state of consciousness with “a variety of symbolic meanings, hedonic responses, and aesthetic criteria” (Holbrook & Hirschman, 1982, p. 132).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Omnichannel Experience: A holistic, fully integrated shopping experience, drawing on integrated offline and online marketing efforts.
Luxury Service: A high-quality, extraordinary, hedonic service, characterized by exclusivity.
Digital Environment: A setting or place produced through computer technology—including websites, mobile applications, social media, audio and video content, and other web-based resources—that allow social interaction.
Servicescape: The setting or ambience in which the service is delivered and in which the service experience between provider and customer takes place.
E-Servicescape: A service’s online environment.
Service Experience: The interaction between provider and customer when service is provided.
Case Vignette: Short, written summary of a case study.
Co-Creation: The process of designing a product, service, or experience, in which customer inputs and interactions play a central role throughout the whole process.