Exploring Customers’ Internal Response to the Service Experience: An Empirical Study in Healthcare

Abstract

Service organizations increasingly understand the importance of managing the customer experience to enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty. This study aims to develop a better understanding of the customer experience by investigating how the customer’s internal mechanisms influence it. That is, how it is perceived and processed at three different levels (visceral, behavioral and reflective), which determines a person’s cognitive and emotional state. To this purpose an exploratory multi-method ethnographic study was undertaken in a healthcare service. The results showed the emotions provoked by the service experience at each level. These levels are interconnected and impact each other working together to influence a person’s cognitive and emotional state, and thus playing a critical role in the overall evaluation of a service. Results show that elements such as servicescape aesthetics, face-to-face and non-human interactions influence emotions and service evaluations. The service should be designed in a way that induces positive emotions, and a feeling of being in control. Especially in healthcare services there is a need to balance the conflicting responses of the emotional stages that may be triggered at the visceral and behavioral levels, while providing reassurance and calm at the reflective level that the health problem is going to be taken care. Using service design approaches this understanding of the customers’ brain can be translated into improving the customer experience.