Staging experiences and providing optimal customer experience has become the new battlefield within the marketing segment, since the introduction of experience economy. The modern customer has multiple devices, channels and touchpoints to interact with the organization and with rapidly changing digital technology, where the product or service information are available online 24/7, he/ she is in-charge of his/ her own experiences. This multitude of options pose great challenges for the organization to understand customer needs, expectations, and behavior, and predict and manage customer experience. Despite numerous studies and streams of literature, several authors, scholars, and practitioners have developed fragmented frameworks and models that partially addresses this multidimensional construct of customer experience. Furthermore, things get complicated when these fragmented constructs are used by the luxury travel industry to design, develop, and manage customer experience. Therefore, in order to address this broad concept and provide the organization with a holistic framework that can be leveraged for providing customer experience, we conducted a qualitative multi-case study, that included 14 semi-structured interviews from various actors within the supply- chain of the luxury travel industry. Using thematic analysis, the rich empirical data from the interviews were analyzed and transformed into sub-themes and themes. Keeping these themes as the foundation, we propose an integrated conceptual model that captures a firm integrating customer and co-creation perspectives to provide customer experience. This integrated model consists of five building blocks, Organizational Factors, Design, Delivery and Management of customer experience, Co-Creation, Customer Experience Insights / Metrics and Moderating Factors, that coupled together should influence customer experience. Using this conceptual model, we analyzed how different actors within the supply-chain provide customer experience. Subsequently, we also develop a customer journey map (from a customer perspective) consisting of customer needs, channels, and touchpoints to understand the critical touchpoint that act as the primary contributors for providing customer experience. And finally, we highlight the driving factors and barriers for providing customer experience within luxury travel industry.

Background: Traditional banks in Sweden are undergoing major transformations from interacting mainly through physical touchpoints with a product-centric approach to an expanded range of digitalised touchpoints and a more customer-centric approach. This transformation exemplifies what in research is referred to as digital servitisation.  Purpose: To explore perceived implications in the banks’ relationship to customers when they digitalise customer touchpoints. Furthermore, to understand how different roles involved in customer relationship management and customer touchpoints - strategic, analytical and operational perspectives - perceive the work needed to interact with customers through different touchpoints. Method: Through a qualitative, interpretative, multiple case study two traditional Swedish banks are explored in their work with their relationships with their customers and digitalised touchpoints. The empirical data is gathered through 15 semi-structured interviews with respondents working analytically, operationally and strategically to gain as representative an understanding of the general perception among employees as possible.  Findings: Using a thematic analysis, the thesis presents six themes; (1) Customers in charge of interactions, (2) Becoming more complex, (3) Relationships are more interchangeable, (4) Rethinking relationship components, (5) Connecting the dots and (6) Integrating the old with the new. The themes are clustered as Changes (1-3) and Adaptations (4-6).  Conclusions: The thesis concludes that the relationship between banks and their customers has and continues to change in the transformation of digital servitisation. The demands and behaviours of the customer are perceived to change, simultaneously they gain more power over the relationship and the banks become more interchangeable. Thus, the banks must change along with the relationship to adhere to the customers’ demands, in order to stay relevant and keep their competitive advantage. At the time being, there are several ways that the banks believe that this can be done, but continue to express that they are still exploring to find the right approach and how to execute it.