From captive to captivating: The new customer journey model for companies

From purely transactional to personalised and unique, customer experiences can extend far beyond the exchange of goods. Companies often focus on functional and transactional experiences because they are the easiest to understand. A large part of purchase behaviour is, however, subjective and occurs in the context of the emotional relationship between companies and their customers. Together, Wharton Customer Analytics (WCA) and C Space explored and quantified the strength of this customer–company relationship while identifying the commercial benefits of customer-centricity (Customer Experience Code). Using the simple clustering method, k-means, WCA led the process of identifying discrete levels of customer-centricity and C Space augmented the analysis with new data on 160 companies. Together, WCA and C Space observed a significant relationship between the measure of a company’s customer-centricity and its performance. In addition, this study proposed a novel company journey framework, in which companies evolve from having a highly transactional customer relationship to one that is emotionally relevant and, crucially, provides the levers for improving customer-centricity. The framework also links this journey to the more typical customer satisfaction metric, net promoter score (NPS), and other measures of word-of-mouth (eg earned advocacy score [EAS]). A recent illustration of this journey is the surprising transformation of the logistics industry, which saw a large gain in emotional connections between 2019 and 2020. UPS, specifically, positively traversed all emotional categories and grew from the bottom to the top in less than a year. The data reveals that UPS’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic illustrated to their customers they are much more than a parcel delivery service.