The dawn of traditional CX metrics? Examining satisfaction, EXQ, and WAR

Abstract

Customer experience (CX) has evolved into a top priority of business executives worldwide. CX is a key determinant of long-term corporate success. CX research has become commonplace among academics and marketing practitioners alike. Despite CX’s omnipresence, scholars and managers cannot agree on the meaning, foundations of CX, and develop enough evidence and tools to demonstrate CX’s crucial link to firm performance. Many argue that market researchers, by still relying on proxy measurements of CX, such as service quality, customer satisfaction, or the Net-Promoter-Score, all measurements with very little or no link to consumer behavior, are to be partially blamed for this predicament. As a result, there is a growing need for new, more comprehensive measurements built to understand the CX as main driver of consumer behavior. Scholars try to address this need by offering new measures, such as CX quality (EXQ), and the wallet allocation rule (WAR). The goal of our article is to use one of the most used measurements, customer satisfaction, in comparison with EXQ and WAR to determine which one of them can explain and predict consumer behavior best. Behavior is measured by examining the share-of-category of customers with multiple automobiles. The study highlighted that CX is a far better predictor of consumer behavior than customer satisfaction. Indeed, it provides more insight and a stronger explanatory power of consumers’ share-of-wallet (SoW). The findings confirmed that customer satisfaction has a weak influence on share-of-category. We could not confirm the proposed powerful correlation between share-of-category and the WAR. The most interesting finding is that the direct relationship between CX and SoW is negative in nature. We discuss the reasons for this counterintuitive result and its implication for theory, managers, and market researchers.