Over the past two decades, Customer Experience (CX) has become a central focus for most firms across multiple industries. The two essays in this dissertation take a managerial perspective to examine possible avenues to advance knowledge in customer experience management research. The first essay focuses on investigating drivers of CX in a technology-mediated environment, and the second essay takes a strategic Mitigation in Marketing (MiM) approach to explore avenues for mitigating adverse CX consequences in overcrowded hedonic service settings.

The first essay investigates the evolving concept of the metaverse and its implications for CX design and marketing. This study integrates insights from technology-based journals, secondary marketplace developments, and the viewpoints of 78 business professionals to analyze the metaverse’s evolving conceptual boundaries, opportunities for consumer experiences and possible business implications. Moreover, the study presents a systematic review of 164 marketing-focused scholarly articles to synthesize existing knowledge and propose a cohesive definition and an organizing framework of the metaverse, a characterization of possible consumer experiences along three dimensions (i.e., immersivity, sociability, and environmental fidelity). Furthermore, taking a resource-based view, the study lays out implications and avenues for future research along marketing intelligence, marketing communication, innovation, customer experience, consumer behavior and policy formulation. This study represents a pioneering effort to contextualize the metaverse through the lens of customer experience.

The second essay shifts the focus to physical customer experiences in overcrowded hedonic settings. Specifically, the study employs a text-mining approach to comprehensively study online reviews of three firms by comparing consumer responses before and after the implementation of dynamic pricing strategies aimed at enhancing CX by managing crowd levels. The results suggest that dynamic pricing does not improve crowding-related complaints. In a follow up analysis, this study employs propensity score matching to analyze observational survey data from a 3-wave field study under three conditions: (i) before dynamic pricing, (ii) after dynamic pricing, and (iii) dynamic pricing with CX-driven mitigations. The results suggest that dynamic pricing alone does not resolve overcrowding-related adverse CX, and that CX-driven crowding-related interventions have the potential to enhance CX and other consumer outcomes in overcrowded service settings.