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Abstract: In today's fast-paced, globalized, and interconnected world, creating and delivering strong and enduring customer experiences during the entire customer's purchase journey have become a critical condition to attract and retain clients. However, knowledge and motivational antecedents giving rise to superior performance in this domain have not been addressed in previous research. This paper tries to overcome this research gap by analyzing how marketing-specific human capital and motivation contribute to the generation and delivery of successful customer experiences. To that end, a questionnaire was designed and administered to a representative sample of 346 Spanish firms with more than 100 employees, and SEM based on PLS was then applied to test the hypotheses put forward by the research. Our results show that motivation affects customer experience both directly and indirectly by increasing the marketing-specific knowledge of employees in the marketing function. Moreover, customer knowledge and marketing-related skills are the only constituents of marketing-specific human capital that significantly affect customer experience.
Keywords: Intellectual capital; Knowledge resources; Human capital; Motivation; Customer experience; Marketing
1.Introduction
Customers now interact with firms through a myriad of touch points in multiple channels and media, resulting in more complex customer journeys. This causes a reduced control of the experience, which at the same time requires firms to integrate multiple business functions in creating and delivering positive customer experiences (CE) (Lemon and Veoref, 2016). In this vein, the marketing function plays a key role in adding and creating value for customers and consequently helping marketing individuals in providing positive CE (Kotler et al., 2005).
Despite the recognition of the importance of CE by practitioners, the academic marketing literature investigating this topic has been limited and tend to focus on outcomes, rather than on theories underlying the antecedents of CE (Verhoef et al., 2009). Thus, according to Lemon and Verhoef (2016) the question arises about the drivers of CE and how they differ across industries and cultures. Considering the scarcity of systematic scholarly research on antecedents of CE, the aim of this paper is to analyze the impact that marketing-specific human capital (i.e., all the knowledge possessed by marketing and sales staff) (Peñalba-Aguirrezabalaga et al., 2020) and motivation have on the generation and delivery of successful CE.
We focus on these two antecedents, as...