Journal of Service Management

Purpose – Customer experience has become increasingly important for service organizations that see it as a source of sustainable competitive advantage, and for service designers, who consider it fundamental to any service design project.

Design/methodology/approach – Integrating contributions from different fields, CEM was conceptually developed to represent the different aspects of customer experience in a holistic diagrammatic representation. CEM was further developed with an application to a multimedia service. To further develop and build CEM's models, 17 customers of a multimedia service provider were interviewed and the data were analyzed using Grounded Theory methodology.

Findings – Combining multidisciplinary contributions to represent customer experience elements enables the systematization of its complex information. The application to a multimedia service highlights how CEM can facilitate the work of multidisciplinary design teams by providing more insightful inputs to service design.

Originality/value – CEM supports the holistic nature of customer experience, providing a systematic portrayal of its context and shifting the focus from single experience elements to their orchestration.