Customer Experience Management and Loyalty in Fast Moving Consumer Goods in Nairobi County, Kenya

Abstract

Customer experience increasingly taking the center stage as an approach firms are using to ensure customer loyalty as a means of improving sales and profitability. The management of a firm focuses on how that customer will feel about a product and how the same customer will behave in future. In the current business environment that involves standardization of tangible products in industries, firms have to provide unique experiences that will result in customer satisfaction which will in turn influence customer loyalty. Otherwise the survival of the firm becomes threatened. This study aimed at determining the effect of customer experience management on customer loyalty with focus on fast-moving goods manufacturing firms in Nairobi County. The study focused on Sensory Experience, Cognitive Experience, Physical Experience and Relational Experience and how each affects customer loyalty. The study adopted the descriptive research methodology. The target population was the 101 firms that manufacture fast moving consumer goods in Nairobi County. This study was a census. Marketing managers of the firms provided the data by use of a self-administered questionnaire. Though the study targeted 101 respondents, only 68 provided data that were used in the analysis resulting in a response rate of 67.33 percent. Analysis was conducted using summary statistics and linear regression. This study established that customer experience management had positive effect on customer loyalty. Sensory experience management had a weak positive effect on customer loyalty. Cognitive experience management had a weak positive effect on customer loyalty. Physical experience management had a strong positive effect on customer loyalty. Experience management has a strong positive effect on customer loyalty. The study recommends that sensory experience management has to be strengthened to make stronger contribution to customer loyalty. Products must be made to have stronger appeals to touch, sight, sound, taste and smell. Designs of products should be made more attractive to customers. Cognitive experience management should be strengthened so as to contribute more on customer loyalty. The experiential activities of products should be made more interesting to customers and the products should be made to stimulate customers to want to know more about the related technologies about a product. Physical experience management should be enhanced by designing products with features that attract customers to buy more and with quality that will make the customers evangelize the products to others. There should be strengthening of relational experience management by improving delivery of value as exactly promised or even better. The interaction with customers ha to be improved. The quality of products has to improve to make them have more alternative uses.