A new MSI initiative will fund and support academic work to help managers better understand, design, manage, and measure customer experience.

“Managers are faced with an overwhelming set of issues and challenges relating to customer experience. They need empirically-based guidance for best practices and new approaches to customer experience management today,” noted Executive Director Kay Lemon.

Funded research will address important questions with potential to offer new tools, methods, insights and suggested actions for business practice. Among these:

• What are the best ways to model the consumer decision journey today?
• How will the Internet of Things, robotics, and self-enhancement technologies change the customer experience?
• What types of data and methods should be combined to understand and measure the total customer experience?
• How can we leverage insights from psychology, neuroscience and big data to strengthen our understanding of customer experience?
• What are new tools for visualizing, prototyping, and measuring the customer experience?
• How do “micro-experiences” come together to form customers’ overall impressions?

“MSI-supported research seeks to move the needle on significant marketing problems and offer real guidance to marketers,” said Research Director Ross Rizley. “With that in mind, we would welcome members’ input on the initiative and the critical questions that funded proposals should address.”

The new initiative is part of a stream of MSI activities focusing on “Understanding customers and the customer experience,” selected by MSI’s 70+ member companies as a top concern in 2014-2016 research priority-setting process. Other activities include the Frontiers of Marketing conference, the November Trustees Meeting, and a number of new working papers.