Developing a Customer Experience Management Model in Multichannel (Case: Banking Industry)

Aim and Introduction: In today's experience economy, businesses need to focus on creating memorable experiences rather than just providing services and products. Building an excellent customer experience is crucial for companies in customer-oriented industries. Implementing unified customer experience management across multiple channels may seem challenging, but it is necessary to stay competitive. Due to this, customer experience management has become a differentiating concept that focuses on integrating and coordinating customer experiences across various channels for providing banking services and products. Therefore, the current research aims to provide a model for managing customer experience in the banking industry across multiple distribution channels.
Methodology: The purpose of this research is to acquire an applied-developmental understanding of a specific topic. The research is qualitative in nature and implementation, utilizing the method of thematic qualitative analysis. This task involves editing and summarizing interviews, interpreting concepts and words to extract meaningful themes. To aid in the qualitative analysis, MAXQDA software was used. The sample population for this study consisted of theoretical and empirical experts in the fields of marketing and banking, specifically marketing professors and bank managers. The sampling method used was purposeful and non-probabilistic, meaning participants were selected based on their expertise and knowledge of the topic. Seven interviews were initially conducted. After reaching theoretical saturation in the data and codes, two more interviews were conducted to ensure the findings. In total, the research included the opinions of nine experts. The data collection tool used in this research was a semi-structured interview, which allowed for flexibility in exploring participants' perspectives and opinions. The thematic analysis method was employed to analyze these interviews, identifying recurring themes and patterns in the data.
Finding: fter conducting seven interviews, the data and codes reached theoretical saturation. To further ensure the reliability of the findings, two additional interviews were also conducted. In the text extracted from the nine interviews conducted, the process of identifying the codes in the software involved back-and-forth iterations and encompassed 501 coding instances. This means that, first, the primary and general concepts regarding customer experience management in multiple distribution channels were extracted by reviewing the literature on the subject. By conducting interviews and introducing new and more specific concepts, the literature was revisited to explore the topics discussed in the interviews. With this iterative process of moving back and forth between literature and interviews, a total of 302 codes were identified. The process continued until all concepts were allocated to relevant themes. After allocating all concepts to sub-themes and categorizing sub-themes as main themes, the aforementioned process was reviewed several times. In fact, sub-themes and main themes were refined multiple times, and in some cases, they were separated, combined, deleted, or added. The process continued until a satisfactory thematic map of the data was obtained. This thematic map includes 125 concepts, 34 sub-themes, and 8 main themes.
Discussion and Conclusion: The present research was conducted with the aim of presenting a model for managing customer experience in multi-channel distribution channels in the banking industry. After collecting data, analyzing and interpreting it, the model was presented, and the research findings were summarized. According to the model mentioned in this study, organizational, psychological, marketing, and communication factors affect the configuration of banking services, products, and channels. These factors contribute to the customer experience and ultimately lead to customer satisfaction, loyalty, repurchase, and word-of-mouth advertising. Environmental and industrial factors also have an impact on the overall situation. In the research model, novel components such as security and risk management infrastructure, customer perspective, customer engagement, service channel scope, support in service channels, customer journey mapping, and the economic function of customer experience were provided. These components have not been directly addressed or thoroughly studied in previous research.