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Customers seek to engage with service brands and interact with service organizations that enable superior experiences (Lemon and Verhoef, 2016). Organizations respond to customers and shape markets by designing and delivering unique experiences that provide them with a competitive advantage and lead to favorable business outcomes (e.g. customer retention and profitability) (Bolton et al., 2014; Verhoef et al., 2009). Technological developments are changing the capabilities of service organizations and systems (Breidbach et al., 2018) and transforming the customer experience (Lemon, 2016; Van Doorn et al., 2017). In the future, a customer might simultaneously interact with a service robot, sensors built into the servicescape, a mobile application and a human being, who might be an employee or a friend! Moreover, changes in society will accelerate developments in the digital, physical and social realms. In 2050, people worldwide aged 65 or older will outnumber children aged 5 and under; they will become parents much later in life; and most people will live in a large city and not own a car (Cohen, 2014). These population trends will also change the nature of services because each customer is an active participant who co-creates value by drawing upon a unique assortment of capabilities and resources available in these realms.
These three trends – developments in the digital, physical and social realms, changes in actors’ capabilities and resources and societal changes – will stimulate an increase in the need for customized customer experiences. Ultimately, organizations are likely to become more efficient and effective in serving customers so that consumer and societal well-being will improve. However, to truly understand and co-create value within a customer experience, firms require a comprehensive view of the customer experience over time that integrates the digital, physical and social realms. Without this integration, organizations face many customer experience challenges in both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) markets. Predictions abound about the death of brick-and-mortar stores, how customers will spend more time in virtual reality and the ways that robots and artificial intelligence (AI) will replace service employees (Huang and Rust, 2018). For instance, robots are already showing promise in assembling IKEA furniture without human assistance (Burdick, 2018). New developments in each of these realms are already causing marketplace disruptions. For example, as...