Does Digital Transformation Impact Customer Experience?

Introduction

In today’s business world, customers are more knowledgeable and help each business and company to grow. Therefore companies need to think about customers (Law, 2009) and companies must focus on the customers’ requirements and expectations to create and support long-term relationship with customers. Historically, customers are expected fair pricing and reasonable quality, but modern customers have much higher expectations and they are demanding personalized interactions, proactive service, and connected experiences across digital and online channels (Nas, 2019). In addition, many customers turn to use digital platforms; they expect brands to follow them across multiple channels to provide a frictionless experience(Lena Lich, 2020). For instance, 54% of consumers contacted brands via email for customer support in 2018 Leggett, (2018) and 83% of customers argued they want to have ability to move between channels when interacting with a brand. Nevertheless, they also expect these interactions to be smooth, fast and delightful (Lena Lich, 2020).

Nowadays, the business must embrace technology to deliver to a new type of “always-connected” customers. Therefore, information technology (IT) has become an integral part of businesses. IT has become more critical as companies and a top priority for companies to improve their interactions with customers, customer service and sales processes. Along with the rise of digital technologies the digital transformation opens up the possibility of predict customer behavior (Fernández-Rovira et al., 2021). Digital Transformation is “the use of new digital technologies (social media, mobile, analytics or embedded devices) to enable major business improvements (such as enhancing customer experience (CE), streamlining operations or creating new business models)” (Fitzgerald, Kruschwitz et al., 2014, p. 2). Many firms have started implementing Digital Transformation (DT) to improve their organizational processes, enhance their customer value propositions, increasing service quality, cost reduction and investment in innovation on new products and services. Digital Transformation also helps them gain a competitive advantage and improve their customer experience (Duan et al.,2012; Fitzgerald et al., 2014; Westerman and Bonnet, 2015)

For the past decade, the concept of CE has received considerable in both marketing studies and companies and creating a higher customer experience has become vital for each business. Studies predict that customer experience will be more important than the price and quality of product and service (Lobzhanidze, 2019). A positive customer experience is essential to the success of every business because a happy and satisfied customer can become a loyal customer and boost revenue (Bordeaux, 2020).

Although customer experience has received a growing amount of interest among researchers and researchers have been offered to explain the importance or otherwise of CE (Ashrafpour et al., 2021; Komulainen and Saraniemi, 2019; Rose et al., 2012; Roy, 2018; Srivastava and Kaul, 2016), there is lack of research to identify the role of Digital Transformation on customer experience.

The literature shows only few studies have developed a comprehensive approach helping managers of the companies to understand the impact of customer experience on the organization environments, considering the digital transformation (Hafsi and Assar, 2020). Moreover, from a theoretical point of view the majority of studies on CE are quantitative in nature and fragmented and tend to only partially explain the phenomenon. While some researchers studied only a few factors and ignore factors which other studies find important.