Defining the customer experience: Tourism & Health

Abstract

[eng] Customer experience management requires a strategic framework and a mighty organizational culture to manage a process of intentional creation, continuous monitoring, and proactive management of the customer experience. It involves putting the core concepts of customer experience into practice. All the above aspects, together with the breadth of the holistic experience, the diversity of participants, and the multitude of elements linked to its generation, make this a very complete and complex discipline. Given the complexity of the discipline in the service sector, deepening its definition and management process generically, and expanding it with the study of its applicability in two industries in which the customer experience has a transcendental relevance, such as the tourism and health sectors, can facilitate the research process to be more fruitful. The purpose is to enhance comprehension of the 'holistic experience' by thoroughly examining the entire customer journey across all relevant channels (Voorhees et al., 2017) and analyzing it from all perspectives (McColl-Kennedy et al., 2015). This includes identifying customer journey phases, behaviors, service encounters (Akaka et al., 2015), touchpoints (Becker & Jaakkola, 2020), agents involved, stimuli (Brakus et al., 2009), and emotional impacts. At the same time, providing knowledge on how organizations can manage these elements requires an understanding of the management areas, environments, and partners specific to each sector. Due to the significance of the hotel and hospital sectors for both the global and Spanish economies, this research explores the definition and development of experiences customized for these industries. The objective is to provide a comprehensive explanation of the experience and its elements and guidelines for organizations to follow in creating it. Based on in-depth knowledge of the process and objective, the aim is to provide differential guidelines useful to hotel and hospital organizations for a good approach to the patient experience activity. The thesis is structured around three contributions to achieve our main research goals. As a starting point, the foundation article focuses on defining the holistic experience of hotel guests throughout the consumption process from the hotel's perspective. In this first paper (chapter 2), the initial study in this thesis conducted through in-depth interviews and case studies validates the concept of Hotel Guest Experiential Journey to name the entirety of the customer’s consumption behaviors that generate an experience. It also clarifies the comprehensive definition of the holistic customer experience first in the hospitality industry and adapts the general experience framework of Gentile et al. (2007). The provided segregation of the stages and behaviors of the guest experience and, the identification of the main service encounters allow us to obtain a real vision of the process of generating the guest experience in hotels, and the weight that each moment of the consumption process has concerning the experience. The second paper (chapter 3) focuses on describing the process of generating experiences. Previous research evidenced a lack of insight into touchpoints beyond firm control, pointing out that most of the reviewed research shows a narrow scope of stimuli and touchpoints (Becker & Jaakkola, 2020). This approach gives rise to studying diverse offering-related stimuli through multiple levels of aggregation. Through focus groups with experts, the most relevant aspects were identified to achieve an emotional impact on customers, guaranteeing the generation of positive and memorable experiences. The objective of the third phase (chapter 4) of the research is to apply the knowledge obtained in previous studies on experience generation to another service sector industry, healthcare. The study examines the outpatient patient experience at HUGC, a Quironsalud hospital. It provides an applied vision of the process of generating experiences in health. The case study (3rd paper) defines, contextualizes, and assesses various aspects of outpatient patient experience, providing a comprehensive understanding of both organizational and intrinsic factors that may impact it.

The preceding three articles collectively advance the field of customer experience research. They collectively achieve the initial objectives set forth, providing a comprehensive understanding of the holistic experience of hotel guests throughout the consumption process. Furthermore, they identify the specific objectives that a hotel should strive to achieve at each stage of the experiential process. Moreover, the specific knowledge gained has been applied to a different subsector, namely health. This entailed conceptualizing a comprehensive experience management model and delineating its constituent elements in the context of a hospital's outpatient clinics.