Towards a service ecosystem perspective on customer experience: insights from hybrid (online-offline) customer journeys

Emerging digital service ecosystems facilitate dynamic interactions among multiple actors, collectively shaping customer experience. However, established customer experience frameworks are limited in addressing the complexity of modern customer journeys that encompass both analog and digital touchpoints. Based on a systematic scoping literature review across the disciplines of marketing, media, information systems, and service, this study conceptualises two intertwined customer experience frameworks – a zoom-out perspective for the ecosystem and a zoom-in perspective for a more fine-grained perspective on customer experience – before quantitatively evaluating it in the cultural context. Our frameworks illustrate how customer experience can be viewed and analyzed during hybrid customer journeys – encompassing both analog and digital touchpoints – and capture customer experience as a dynamic, multi-actor process across pre-encounter, encounter, and post-encounter stages. Our results provide organisations with a strategic tool to understand and design customer experience within service ecosystems, comprising both analog and digital touchpoints, thereby fostering value co-creation and engagement.