Customer Experience and Business Organizational Behavior:
The era in which customers played an essentially passive role in the consumption of value in the form of business products and services is quickly coming to an end. C.K. Prahalad and Venkatram Ramaswamy (2000) have argued that the new customer is an active player engaged in an explicit dialogue with manufacturers of products and services. Equally significant is the fact that this dialogue, facilitated by the Internet, is no longer controlled exclusively by corporations. In essence, organizational theorists are coming to the conclusion that customers are engaged in fundamentally changing the dynamics of the marketplace and presenting themselves as a new source of competence for the corporation. This concept - that customer experience is both a necessary element in business activity and a vital source of new competencies - reflects the realization that the economics of customer retention and satisfaction are more compelling today than ever before (Jacob, 1994). An evaluation of the posited relationship between customer experience and idealized business or organizational structure, as advanced by Prahalad and Ramaswamy (2000), will be offered herein, along with a set of criteria against which such a theory can be assessed.
At issue in the new global economic order, according to Prahalad and Ramaswamy (2000), is the notion that successful companies are those which have moved beyond the acceptance of customers as passive recipients of goods and services and toward the integration of customer experience (or competencies) into enhanced business networks and systems. Customers are being repositioned as codevelopers and creators of personalized experiences, with companies and lead customers having joint or shared roles in education, shaping of experiences, and cocreating market acceptance for products and services. It is clear that this approach to "customer service" and ...