This study answers its main research question (RQ1) by presenting two concep-tualizations of cognitive customer experience formation in the e-commerce con-text. While this dissertation investigates customer experience formation from a theoretical perspective and through empirical investigations, both the theoretical and the empirical findings of this dissertation present similar conceptualizations of the formation of customer experience. Based on the sensemaking theory, the first conceptualization concludes that customer experience formation as a cogni-tive process includes self-related, sociomaterial, retrospeccogni-tive, and prospeccogni-tive sensemaking, including considerations of self, the sociomaterial environment, the past, and the future. Based on the empirical studies, the second conceptual-ization implies that customer experience formation includes dyadic, personal, so-cial, contextual, and multilateral considerations. The identified meaning-creation processes depict the dimensions of customer experience formation.
By comparing the two conceptualizations (Figure 10), it can be suggested that the core themes of customer experience formation when investigated from the customers’ perspective are self-relatedness, sociomateriality, and temporality.
It can be concluded that both conceptualizations identify the self-related and so-ciomaterial dimensions of customer experience formation that are suggested in the theoretical model. The dyadic, social, contextual, and multilateral dimensions that are identified in the empirical conceptualization can be understood as factors that depict the elements of the sociomaterial dimension that is defined in the sensemaking conceptualization. Furthermore, the personal dimension of the em-pirical model gives insights into what the self-related considerations that are identified in the theoretical model can entail. Therefore, it can be suggested that the empirical characterization offers indirect support for the sensemaking char-acterization of customer experience formation. The temporal dimensions of cus-tomer experience formation that are identified by the sensemaking characteriza-tion in turn do not have a specific role in the empirical model because the data from the original papers have not been analyzed in terms of temporal considera-tions. However, the empirical findings give some insights regarding the temporal elements in customer experience formation and suggest that the dyadic, personal, social, contextual, and multilateral considerations can have temporal elements.
For instance, the findings show that customers engage in prospective considera-tions during their shopping processes by considering and imagining the possible outcomes of their purchases, and these considerations can contribute to customer experience formation.
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FIGURE 10 The similarities and differences between the sensemaking model and the em-pirical model of customer experience formation
The key contribution of this dissertation is the demonstration of the multidimen-sionality of customer experience formation through the two conceptualizations.
The second essential contribution is the advancement of customer-centric cus-tomer experience research. While previous cuscus-tomer experience literature (espe-cially empirical research) has focused on company-led investigations of customer experience and highlighted customers’ reactions to service stimuli and the inter-action between companies and customers, this study places the customer in the center of attention and studies customer experience formation through custom-ers’ lenses. This study advances the customer experience literature by character-izing customer experience as a cognitive mental picture and studying how cus-tomers construct their customer experiences through meaning creation. The study extends the existing knowledge by providing insights that depict custom-ers’ meaning creation processes that are not restricted to a service provider. As a result, this study shows the complexity and broadness of customer experience formation in terms of how customers create their experiences and the multiple factors that can be involved in that creation. Based on the sensemaking literature, the conceptual investigation of this thesis discovers and pictures possible ways of how customers create meanings. The empirical investigations provide real-life insights into customers’ meaning creation through customer narratives that de-pict customers’ thoughts during their e-commerce encounters. The findings of this study show that from a customer’s perspective, the customer experience is not the customer's mental picture of a company but rather the wider mental pic-ture associated with the company. This means that the meanings included in the customer experience can be directly linked to the company, but can also include
any kind of meanings that are awakened either when visiting the company or when encountering some information related to the company. While customers consider the main service provider, such as online stores, during their online store visits and online shopping journeys, they also actively consider and evalu-ate other companies, themselves, current phenomena, and other people when constructing their customer experience. The multidimensional considerations bring different nuances to the customer experience, and determine whether the customer experience is, for example, positive or negative in tone.
In line with previous studies (e.g., Verhoef et al. 2009, Rose et al. 2012), the findings of this study indicate that companies can partially influence yet not per-fectly define the customer experience. Customer experience is linked to elements that a company can control (e.g., its service interface and assortment) and to fac-tors that are outside a firm’s control (e.g., other people and different phenomena).
While previous studies have identified the possibility of external variables and touchpoints in customer experience formation, how customers perceive different factors outside the primary service provider and throughout their customer jour-neys remains mostly unknown (Kuehnl, Jozic & Homburg 2019). The empirical findings of this study provide new insights into what those contributors can be and how customers make sense of them. In line with Rose et al. (2012), this dis-sertation concludes that identification of the essential components of website quality provides a starting point for customer experience understanding in an online and e-commerce context; however, customer experience is much more than the interpretation of a website’s elements. In line with Wolfinbarger and Gilly (2003), this dissertation demonstrates that customer experiences in e-com-merce are built during the entire customer journey, including encounters with the website, delivery agents, and customer service, if needed. Overall, the find-ings therefore show that when investigating customer experience, it is important to embrace the role and perspective of the customer.
As a whole, this dissertation responds to the request for novel insights into the customer experience. Researchers have lately called for frameworks depict-ing customer experience (Jain, Aagja & Bagdare 2017), understanddepict-ing of holistic individual-level perspectives of customer experience and how customer experi-ence is formed (Lipkin 2016), diverse research approaches for understanding cus-tomers (Heinonen & Strandvik 2018), and novel thinking about customer expe-rience (McColl-Kennedy et al. 2015). By adopting the customer view, discuss-ing customer experience as a sensemakdiscuss-ing process and by creatdiscuss-ing another conceptualization of customer experience formation based on empirical evi-dence, this dissertation provides new insight into all the above requests. The new theoretical and empirical insights and ideas of customer experience for-mation identified in this study can be utilized and taken forward in service re-search and customer-focused service design.
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