Customer Experience and its Implication for Value Creation within the Night-Time Economy

Sammanfattning: The consumer behaviour is adapting within industries due to new technologies such as smart phones. As consumer behaviour changes so do companies by adapting their way of engaging and interacting with their customers. This provides potential to innovate new service offerings. Successfully launching new services which provide value for the customer is faced with risk of failure. To mitigate risks associated with failure, a clear understanding of the customer can aid with understanding what value a service offering should provide to be successfully adopted by the market. Due to customer experience being unique for each individual, personalization is a technique which could be used within software to improve the customer experience. Challenges could arise in terms of scarcity of data which can impact the performance negatively of a data driven algorithm. However, veracity is another aspect of data known to be associated with the potential to improve performance. Based on these two issues, this study conducted a sequential mixed methods study consisting of an etnographic study on Instagram to better understand the customer experience within nightlife. Furthermore, the netnographic study enabled the construction of a gold standard, which were used while conducting a GSDMM topic modelling experiment with the purpose to evaluate what topics required further pre-processing due to high ambiguity of the text content. Findings from the netnographic study and its implication for customer experience was discussed from the point of view of a software service offering. This study suggests software offerings within nightlife to improve customer experience during the pre-purchasing phase by considering aspects related to age, interests in atmosphere, type of activity, preferred music genres, spending time with friends or facilitating escapism. The discussed service has negligible control during the post-purchasing stage suggesting that the firm could innovate controlled touchpoints, such experiences can be related to anticipation, joy, celebration, social adventures, memory of previous nights out (stories), current music preferences or new desires occurring spontaneously. Upon adopting a service dominant logic, this study suggests that software services can facilitate the customer experience within nightlife through co-creation, since with the proper usage of data, network effects could occur between the customer and an organizer or venue within nightlife, but also between customer to customer. A future study is proposed to investigate how the coordination could be conducted through crowd-sourced based interactions where the software functions as an overseer of a multi-actor setting to provide further insights regarding how such coordination impacts the co-creation of value.