Andrus Kotri successfully defended his Ph.D dissertation

Delivering superior customer experience has become a critical success factor for many organizations during the last decade. Customer experience is evoked using clues provided by the organization, and appraised based on the customer's perceptions and background. Customer experience involves the customer's subjective and holistic response to interactions with the organization and its service. From the customer experience perspective, it is not the product or service that is the object of production and the conveyor of value to the customer, but the evoked customer experience. Despite the importance of the topic, the knowledge base that deals with customer experience and its evocation is currently only developing. The aim of this thesis was to develop a framework for customer experience evoking and management. To this end various theoretical approaches from the fields of marketing, behavioural economics, psychology and organizational management were analyzed and integrated into a coherent framework. The validity of the tentative framework was investigated and the knowledge base was deepened via a case study of six Estonian service organizations. Firstly, the results of the study indicated that customer experience should be analyzed as consisting of seven dimensions during the entire customer (consumption) journey. The relevant dimensions are: sensory, emotional, cognitive, imaginative, bodily, social and instrumental. Secondly, the study explained the need to distinguish conceptually between 1) customer experience evoking, and 2) customer experience management. It is important to note that in addition to clues delivered by the organization, customer experience evoking is also influenced by subjective customer-specific factors and universal psychological principles. Thirdly, the study revealed that customer experience management is a strategic activity that involves the whole organization in systematically evoking customer experiences in a way that creates value for both customers and the organization. Customer experience management encompasses the following six processes: understanding customer experience requirements, planning customer experience evoking, organizing customer experience evoking, coordinating, measuring and improving customer experience evoking.